


Of Monsters

by rosa_acicularis



Series: Amor Mundi [3]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-29
Updated: 2013-11-29
Packaged: 2018-01-02 23:45:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 23,961
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1063098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosa_acicularis/pseuds/rosa_acicularis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>"How bad would the thing in the dark have to be," he says, "to scare a girl like Rose Tyler?"</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Contains violence and disturbing themes.

  
_Tonight, child, I am going to tell you a story. Listen carefully.  
_

_There’s more to stories than you think._  
  
++  
  
In the end, he dies.  
  
The Master has died many times, in many ways, and while being shot in the gut by his lunatic wife _(widow)_ is perhaps the most mundane death he has suffered, it is by no means the most painful. He passes into nothingness, unsurprised.  
  
What happens next, however, is something entirely new.  
  
His body is gone _(burnt to ash, no doubt, and lightly salted with maudlin Time Lord tears)_ but he is ripped back into consciousness, incorporeal, his physical self nothing more than a blueprint for a building as yet unmade. Then the world convulses and he can feel each brick and bone as it falls into place, hearts one and two and the delicate twining, twisting of nerves through new muscle, like pea plants curling along a trellis. New lungs and nose and mouth and he thinks, _Why does Hell smell of rotting hot dogs?_  
  
“Not hell,” a woman’s voice says in the darkness. “Milwaukee.”  
  
The Master opens his eyes and finds himself naked in an abandoned lot behind a 7-Eleven. He sits on dry grass and dirt, trembling new skin blue with cold, curled into a wall of unforgiving metal — a skip overflowing with rubbish and stink. The sky is violet, paled by the lights of the city, but his companion remains wreathed in shadow. The streetlights are dark.  
  
“I was dead,” he says. New ears, new mouth, but his voice is the same. He has not regenerated.  
  
The shadow shrugs. “You got better.”  
  
He laughs then, head in his hands and shaking, the sound low and raw and so inconsolably mad that he is almost frightened by it — which only makes him laugh all the harder. “I know you,” he says, when he finds the breath. “I can’t remember how, but I do.”  
  
The shadow shifts, her posture straightening slightly, as if he has only just now earned her full attention. “Oh, well done. I wasn’t sure how much of that great bastard brain of yours would survive intact.” She sounds mildly pleased.  
  
The Master pulls his knees to his chest, the winter air sharp against his naked skin. “The moment the muscles in my legs stop twitching I’m going to walk over there and kill you,” he says, smiling at the darkness. “Just so you know.”  
  
The shadow chuckles, and it is an awful sound. “Promises, promises. So cruel to get a girl’s hopes up when what _little_ you have to offer couldn’t possibly satisfy.”   
  
“Bit unfair to be taking measurements in this sort of weather, don’t you think?” He grins, teeth bared. “So who are you, then? Death incarnate? Father Christmas? My very own fairy godmother, creaming her knickers to grant me my heart’s desire and make all my wicked, wicked dreams come true?”  
  
“Blimey,” the voice says, almost laughing. “You really are the most remarkable little shit.” Then she clicks her fingers and a nearby streetlight fizzles into life. “So much for gratitude.”  
  
She grins at him from her seat on an overturned bucket, her hair falling around her face in long, greasy strands. She is barefoot and rail thin, her clothes stiff with dried sweat and dirt, and on one pale finger she wears a very familiar ring.  
  
“After all,” Rose Tyler says, tapping a fingernail as red as blood against her teeth, “you’d still be dead if it wasn’t for me.”   
  
++  
  
 _Every story, child, eventually finds its way to darkness.  
  
Oh, you may not begin in the dark — at the start you may think the story is mother and father and a child born into a world of sunshine and ice cream, a land of good fairies and wise old men. Magic boxes and the stars at your fingertips.  
  
That’s where you start. It’s not where you’ll stay._  
  
++  
  
“She’s getting worse.”  
  
The heavy oak doors of Pete Tyler’s study muffle Mickey’s voice, but with her ear to the wood Rose can just make out the words.  
  
“What do you mean, ‘worse’?” she hears someone ask — Pete, as reasonable and restrained as ever. She presses closer.  
  
“Rose,” says a small voice at her feet. “You’re not supposed to listen at doors. Mum says it’s rude.”  
  
Rose looks down at her brother and stretches her lips into a smile. “Unless she’s the one doing the listening, that is.”  
  
Matthew frowns, and she feels the gentle ebb and flow of his small body as he breathes, his back warm against her shins, legs curled beneath him Indian style. He is small for his age, with pale hair and old eyes. He stares up at her, his expression grave. “I won’t tell,” he whispers. “Not even if she asks.”  
  
She brushes her fingers across his forehead and gives him a brief, real smile. “Thanks, Mattie.”  
  
In the study, Mickey’s voice grows louder. “–to the doctors, and they just call it occupational stress and chuck another bottle of sleeping pills at her. Every day she comes to work exhausted, but she refuses to rest. She doesn’t eat, she never talks about anything but work–”  
  
“Which she does exceedingly well,” Pete says. “Your team is still the most effective in the Institute. In the past few months alone–”  
  
“None of that matters. She’s slipping.” Mickey stops. When he speaks again, his voice is thick. “Maybe you don’t see it, Pete, but she is. She’s never been like this, not even when she was first stuck here. She’s not overworked and she’s not depressed; this is something else. It’s like–”  
  
“It’s like she’s scared.” Rose freezes at the sound of her mother’s voice, little more than a murmur from the other side of the door. “It’s like when she was a little girl, and I’d go into her room in the morning and find her all curled up in the middle of the bed, her sheets pulled over her face.” Jackie’s voice hardens. “She sleeps with the lights on, now. Every lamp. And I can still hear her nightmares from half a house away.”  
  
There is a long silence. Rose closes her eyes and tries to breathe.  
  
It is Pete who asks the question they are all thinking. “How bad would the thing in the dark have to be,” he says, “to scare a girl like Rose Tyler?”  
  
Small fingers curl around her wrist and she looks down to see Matthew watching her closely, a small furrow of worry between his eyebrows. “What thing in the dark?”  
  
She scoops him into her arms and cradles him against her chest, though he is a month away from his fifth birthday and far too old for such treatment. Normally he would squirm and laugh and demand to be set down again; today he rests a sharp chin on her shoulder and sighs.  
  
“Maybe a chocolate biscuit would make you feel better,” he says into her hair, and she has to stifle a laugh.  
  
She leaves the study behind and carries him down the corridor to the fashionably monochrome kitchen. The muscles of her arms burn a little with his weight, but she isn’t ready to let go just yet. “And I suppose you’d like one too.”  
  
“Well, it’s good to share,” he says, and this time she does laugh. She sets him down on the kitchen counter and rifles through the cupboard for the biscuits. “What was Dad talking about?” he asks after a moment. “What thing in the dark?”  
  
Rose hands him a biscuit. “I suppose if I say, ‘It’s a grown up thing, don’t worry about it’ you’ll lose all respect for me and start sneaking snakes into my bed, am I right?”  
  
He shrugs, his trainers bumping against the cabinets as he swings his feet. “You wouldn’t ever say that.”  
  
“No, I wouldn’t.” She takes a bite of her biscuit and immediately wishes she hadn’t — her stomach churns at the taste of food and she has to force herself to swallow. She discreetly returns the biscuit to the counter. “You know what we need? Milk. Two tall, cold glasses of milk. What do you think?”  
  
He frowns at her. “Mum said you have bad dreams. Is that why sometimes you shout at night, like you’re scared?”  
  
Rose flinches. “Oh, Matthew,” she says, her heart in her throat. “I didn’t know you could hear.”  
  
He watches her steadily, chewing his biscuit and waiting for an explanation she does not have. A crumb of chocolate clings to the corner of his mouth, and she’d sworn once that none of this _(lips in a snarl, teeth as white as bone)_ would ever, ever touch him. She tucks her hair behind her ear with shaking fingers and meets his eyes.  
  
 _Once upon a time,_ she thinks, _there was a girl…_  
  
“Matthew, when I was younger, before I lived here with Mum and Dad–”  
  
“When you lived in a police box,” he says, which is how all stories about the Doctor begin. Matthew cares little for aliens or distant worlds — it is his fascination with cops and robbers and police cars that makes the TARDIS an object of wonder to him.  
  
“Yes, when I lived in a police box. One day I…” She falters, unsure how to continue. “It was…”  
  
“Something scary happened,” Matthew says solemnly. “Something bad.”  
  
“Yes.” She swallows. “I met a man who wanted to hurt me.”  
  
Matthew’s forehead wrinkles. “Why’d he want to do that?”  
  
“Because he thought I knew a secret. An important one, one that he needed to know very badly. He thought that by hurting me he could get me to tell him that secret.”  
  
“ _Did_ you tell him?”  
  
“No. But I think…I think when he hurt me, he did something he didn’t mean to. I think he made me sick.”  
  
Matthew’s eyes go wide. “He gave you _cancer?_ ” he whispers, horrified.  
  
It is not funny, but Rose has to bite down hard on her bottom lip to keep herself from laughing. “No, Mattie,” she says, crossing the kitchen to take his hands in hers. “Not cancer. A different kind of sick.”  
  
“Why didn’t the Doctor make you better?”  
  
Rose closes her eyes, and a pale, thin face flickers on the dark screen of her eyelids. Then she opens them again and lets his ghost fade. “The Doctor didn’t know about the man. And I couldn’t tell him, because the man made me forget.” She squeezes his hands gently. “That’s why I shout sometimes when I dream, Matthew. It’s in my dreams that I remember.”  
  
Matthew thinks about this for a long moment, his expression unreadable. Then he says, “Did you hurt the man back?”  
  
She nods, unable to speak.  
  
“Good,” he says grimly. His face brightens. “Can I have another biscuit?”  
  
Rose is still shaken, her smile weak. “Mattie, we’re having dinner in an hour. Mum’ll murder me.”  
  
“Yeah,” he says, “but she’ll be really angry if she hears you’ve been spying.”  
  
“You little toad. I’m almost impressed.” She turns and reaches for the packet of biscuits. “And you have chocolate all over your face, by the–”  
  
It is happening again. She remains upright and steady but the moment slants, slipping away from her like sand beneath her feet, and then she is watching time but is not of it, existing outside of the seconds that pass as she turns back to Matthew, biscuits in hand. Matthew, who sits on the kitchen counter and twitches in the red darkness of the womb and dozes through third period calculus, who is everywhere and nowhere as his hairline recedes and his heart aches for a snide woman in a polka dot dress and his dear, chocolate-smeared face slams against a shattered windscreen — thirty-eight years old and he forgets that _red means stop_ and he dies, quietly, on a Tuesday afternoon.  
  
Time snaps back into place.  
  
Matthew’s tongue searches the corner of his mouth for the neglected bit of chocolate. “Did I get it?” he asks, his eyes crossing as he tries to see for himself.  
  
Roses stares. In the middle of her brother’s chest, hidden behind the fragile bones of his rib cage, a golden ball of wire and thread pulses and throbs in time with the bird-flutter of his heartbeat. And in those threads, in those wires, the life and death of Matthew Peter Tyler burns like candle flame.   
  
And she knows, she is absolutely certain, that if she wished she could reach out and weave those threads into whatever pattern she desired.  
  
++  
  
 _I don’t need to tell you what you will find in the darkness, dear one. You’ve always known it was there, though you could not see it: It is in the shadows stretched thin along your bedroom wall, the groan of the tree outside your window. It is the silence after your mother has doused the lamps and left you alone in the dark. You know it well.  
  
It knows you, too._  
  
++  
  
The first time it had happened she’d been on the bus.  
  
Her day off and she’d ridden the bus into the city, to the Institute. She had promised Mickey she would see a doctor he knew, a Torchwood-employed psychiatrist who wouldn’t try to ship her off to the funny farm the moment she said “parallel universe” and “face-changing alien best mate.” She’d only agreed to the appointment to shut Mickey up; she wasn’t happy about it, but she was going.  
  
She’d been having trouble sleeping lately. She didn’t know why.  
  
It was during the lunch hour and the bus was crowded, thick with shopping bags and umbrellas and bodies, chattering friends and the too full silence of strangers standing too close together. Rose liked taking the bus. It reminded her of things she missed.  
  
Three stops away from the Institute, a woman with a cane and neat grey bun boarded the bus. Rose stood and offered the woman her seat, an automatic gesture born more of habit than consideration. The woman nodded and gave her a small, distracted smile. She sat down.   
  
She sat down, and the world around them convulsed.  
  
At first Rose was sure that there had been a collision, that the bus had been over-turned by some sudden, silent force. She was falling, that much was certain, but her feet did not leave the floor and though the air itself shimmered and swelled with ripples of an impossible, burning light, no one around her seemed to notice anything out of the ordinary.  
  
The windows shattered, were replaced and then damaged again in a heartbeat, thin cracks spreading through the glass like spider webs. Passengers standing and sitting became a blur of movement and possibility, a sea of faceless strangers surging and receding like a tide. Rose looked around her and saw the world as it had been, as it was, and as it would be, and in the midst of the chaos her gaze settled on a single, fixed point.  
  
Her name was Margaret Henries. She’d been a secretary at a major publishing house in a time when no one had minded being called a secretary, and she carried the cane because it had been her husband’s and it amused her to think of herself as sentimental. She read biographies of famous generals and used too much pepper when she cooked and in fifteen days she was going to slip in the bath, break her hip, and die while under anesthesia.   
  
The ripples of light filling the air lengthened and thinned, spinning themselves into a long, golden thread, and Rose watched in horror as that thread slid past the elderly woman’s lips, slithered down her throat, and wound itself into a burning, pulsing knot just to the left of her heart.  
  
Rose’s hand moved of its own volition and for a dizzying moment she thought she might reach inside the woman’s chest, might slide her fingers past the barriers of skin and muscle and bone, gather the knot into her hands _(the porcelain of the bathtub beneath her cheek and so many hours to wait, naked and alone, until someone finds her)_ and pull upon the thread until the death of Margaret Henries unraveled and became something new. Something peaceful.  
  
Something of Rose’s design.  
  
The world righted itself, and Rose stumbled back, away from the woman with the ivory-handled cane and the neat grey bun. The golden knot still beat within the woman’s chest — a living blur of light, just to the left of the heart.  
  
Rose got off at the next stop.   
  
++  
  
 _That which waits in the dark, child, can never touch you when the lamps are lit. Nightmares are cowardly things — it is their nature to cling to the shadows, to hide in dim, wet places where men rarely walk. But children, my love, my heart, my little one — children stumble so easily into the darkness.  
  
And once you have stumbled, it is but a simple thing to fall._  
  
++  
  
 _It’s not like what I did before_ , she tells herself for the hundredth, for the thousandth time. _There wouldn’t be any Reapers. It’s not like travelling to 2049 and dragging him out of the car by his collar — there can’t be a paradox if I’m rewriting what_ should _happen._   
  
Rose watches her own face in the mirror, eyes dark with mascara and exhaustion. She drags her fingers over her mouth and smears the heavy wax of her lipstick. _I could do it_ , she thinks, almost idly. _I could save him._  
  
She looks down at her fingers, and they are sticky and red with makeup.  
  
“Rose, darling, do you want a pickle?”  
  
Her mother’s voice. Rose grimaces and grips the edge of the bathroom sink. “A pickle?” she asks, raising her voice to be heard through the door.  
  
“With your Bloody Mary. Mickey’s having three, strange little man, but I’d thought I’d save one for you if you wanted.” She waits; Rose does not answer. “Do you, sweetheart?”  
  
Rose closes her eyes. “Just celery for me, Mum.”  
  
The morning after her mother’s birthday extravaganza and everyone but Rose is hung over, curled into kitchen chairs and blinking slowly in the daylight. The house is a beautiful mess, the marble floors littered with flowers and confetti and abandoned sound equipment. Rose passed the night with a full glass of champagne in hand, nodding during appropriate moments in conversation and trying not to think about another party, another Jackie Tyler.  
  
Judging by the subdued, withdrawn expression on Pete’s face when she returns to the kitchen, she is not the only one who spent the night lost in memory.  
  
“I found the files,” Jake says as she walks into the room. His eyes are tired and his hair looks as if it has been styled by small woodland creatures, but his is by far the most alert face in the room. “Mick left them in the van.”  
  
Mickey grunts, but does not lift his head from the kitchen table.   
  
Rose accepts the drink her mother pushes into her hands and takes a seat at the table. Jake passes her the stack of files and she nods her thanks, refusing to let her eyes stray to the ball of golden flame and thread _(seventy-two years old, a stroke and the cold floor of an empty house)_ burning behind her friend’s ribs. “Let’s get started.”  
  
 _(She wonders, sometimes, why the fates of some are open to her and others are hidden. Then she looks at the solid, unlit chests of her father and mother and Mickey, and her curiosity turns to relief.)_  
  
Jackie turns away from the drink she’s preparing and glares at her daughter, an olive between her teeth. She pops it into her mouth and begins to chew. “I don’t suppose anyone’s going to explain why you lot are doing paperwork on a Sunday morning.” Rose and Jake exchange a look before glancing nervously in Pete’s direction.  
  
Face still buried in the makeshift pillow of his tuxedo jacket, Mickey makes an amused noise. “We,” he declares, voice muffled, “are defying authority.”  
  
Pete’s expression sharpens, and he turns to Rose. “The bogeyman case?”  
  
She meets his gaze. “Yes.”  
  
“The bogeyman case that Eastman ordered you to drop not once, not twice, but on three separate occasions? One of them in an Institute-wide memorandum?”  
  
Rose opens the topmost file, not breaking eye contact. “He’s wrong.”  
  
“He’s your superior.”  
  
“Doesn’t mean he isn’t wrong.”  
  
There is a tense moment. “And,” Pete says, “when he storms into my office in a few weeks to tell me about all this, I’m going to be very disappointed in you.” He grins. “Shocked, even.”  
  
Rose surprises herself — she laughs. “You’re brilliant, you know that?” The tips of Pete’s ears turn pink, and the sight of powerful Peter Tyler blushing like a flattered schoolgirl is so wonderfully ridiculous that she laughs again. She takes an enthusiastic nibble from her celery stalk and turns to Mickey. “We’re going to need the computer files.”  
  
“Can’t move,” Mickey says to the tabletop. “Brain collapsing.”  
  
Jake smirks. “Baby.”  
  
Jackie takes Mickey’s hand and wraps it around a viciously red Bloody Mary, its toothpicks bowing under the weight of their pickled burden. “Drink.” She pulls another chair to the table and sits, leaning into Pete’s side. “So who’s this Bogeyman bloke when he’s at home? Funny sort of name, isn’t it?”  
  
“It’s not a name,” Rose says, rifling through the file folders for the papers she needs. “We call them the bogeymen because we don’t have a name for them. Or we have too many, which is basically the same thing.”  
  
Jackie snorts. “And what’s that supposed to mean?”  
  
“It’s boring, Jacks,” Pete says, but the warning in his voice is for Rose. “You don’t want to hear about it.”  
  
Engrossed in maps and police reports, Rose continues. “Two thousand years they’ve been coming here. Not in force - small groups, two or three at a time, landing in the night. Coming to take what they wanted.” A lock of hair falls into her eyes, and she tucks it behind her ear. “And we knew it. We gave them names and made them into stories, into the nightmares waiting in the dark, in the water. The shadow standing outside your bedroom window with an empty sack. ‘Don’t play by the river, or she’ll drag you down with the others.’ ‘Don’t wander alone, or it’ll lead you astray.’ ‘Don’t cry out in the middle of the night, or he’ll take you and you’ll never, never come back.’”  
  
Jackie makes a soft, strangled sound. “Rose, what are you–”  
  
“Hundreds of names, from every place you can think of. Kappas in Japan, old woman Gryla in Iceland, La Pére Fouettard and Father Flog and La Llorona, the weeping woman in white. Boo-baggers and bugbears and bogeymen.” Rose looks up and meets her mother’s frightened eyes. “Child-snatchers, Mum. Aliens.”  
  
Jackie’s hand moves to her mouth. “They take children?” Her eyes widen in horrified understanding. “They _kill_ children?”  
  
At this, Rose falters. She turns to Jake, whose lips have gone pale and thin. “Sometimes,” Jake says slowly. “Sometimes they kill them.”  
  
What he does not say hangs heavy in the following silence.  
  
Then Mickey’s hand is on her shoulder and he’s setting his open laptop on the table in front her. “Rose, they’ve sent those files from Romania. Do you want to open them now, or–”  
  
“Yes,” she says, and clicks on the e-mail attachment. She doesn’t want to worry about her mum, or Pete, or Matthew asleep upstairs in his bed. She wants to do her job, not listen at closed doors or frighten her mother with words that sound as if they belong in someone else’s mouth. She wants her family to stop looking at her as if she’s a stranger.  
  
The documents in the attachment are from an independent tech scavenger in Bucharest, the friend and occasional rival who’d brought the bogeyman case to Rose’s attention more than eight months before. Rose skims through the first few pages of the file, impatient to reach the information they’d been promised. Mickey stands at her shoulder, and she senses his horror _(the twitch of his hand, the sharp intake of breath)_ moments before she understands its cause.  
  
Before them is a woodcut, sixteenth century and showing its age, of a child asleep. A little boy in a dark room, curled in blankets, only his moon-round face and one small foot exposed. And from the shadows beneath the child’s bed a skeletal arm emerges, skin smooth and glowing white against the darkness, its impossibly long, bone-thin fingers reaching up, slipping around the boy’s ankle and–  
  
Mickey closes the laptop with a sharp click.  
  
“So,” Jake says after a moment. “I take it we got what we were looking for.”  
  
Jackie looks at each of them, her eyes wary. “And what’s that, then?”  
  
Rose lays her hand over the computer. “Proof.”   
  
Pete reaches across the table for the laptop, and a moment later he’s reading the file, his expression like something carved from stone. He finishes, and then sits back in his chair. “This is from one of your Eastern European contacts,” he says, his tone unreadable.  
  
Rose nods. “There were rumours — ghost stories, old wives’ tales — and he followed them to a monastery outside Oradea.”   
  
Jackie makes a soft, disbelieving noise. “This…” She gestures at the computer screen. “This thing came from a book written by a bunch of monks?”  
  
Mickey sits, but his hand stays on the back of Rose’s chair, his knuckles a comforting pressure against her shoulder. “It’s a record,” he says, his voice deceptively even. “A translation of the first-hand account of a man whose son was taken. He interrupted the abduction, and that’s what he saw.”  
  
Rose leans forward, resting her elbows on the table. “For centuries there have been cases of child abduction that corresponded with subtle, unexplained indications of alien activity, but it’s been impossible to prove the connection definitively. Until now.”  
  
Jackie rolls her eyes. “God, is this how you talk at the office? Little wonder you’re still single.”  
  
Rose sighs. “Mum–”  
  
Jackie ignores her. “Anyway, this is just a picture and a story. How does it prove anything?”  
  
Pete closes the laptop. “It proves that this man tried to protect his son, and that the creature — the demon, he calls it — retaliated and left him for dead. It proves that he was taken to the monastery and treated for serious injuries, injuries that perfectly match those inflicted by an advanced energy weapon.” He is silent for a long moment. “He was a printer, and an artist. Once he’d recovered, he carved this woodcut, tied a rope around his neck, and hanged himself from the rafters of the chapel.”   
  
Jackie shifts in her chair, and Rose thinks she sees her take Pete’s hand under the table. “But that was ages ago,” she says. “You…you’re not saying they still come here?”  
  
Rose pulls a file folder from the stack and opens it in front of Pete. “Since the Institute was founded in 1879, we’ve tried to track their visits, hoping to establish some sort of pattern so we could predict when and where they’d come next.”  
  
Jake nods. “The ‘when’ was easy enough, if a bit irregular by our calendar, but no one’s been able to find a pattern in where they land or who they take.” He glances at Mickey and Rose. “And then seven years ago they stopped coming altogether.”  
  
Jackie frowns. “What do you mean, stopped?”   
  
Rose shrugs. “Exactly that, Mum. Our tech is more sensitive to nonterrestrial activity than ever, but in the last seven years we haven’t picked up a single incident. Not one.” She pauses. “They’re gone.”  
  
Jackie turns to her husband. “But isn’t that a good thing?”  
  
“Might be,” Pete says slowly, his eyes on Rose. “But you don’t think it is.”   
  
“There are all sorts of explanations for why they might have disappeared,” Rose says, careful to keep her tone detached and professional. “War, plague, political trouble back home — wherever that is. Maybe they just lost interest. Maybe they’re gone forever. We haven’t any reason to suppose otherwise.” She looks from Mickey, to Jake, to her mum, her gaze finally settling again on Pete. “But if you want to know what I think–”  
  
“I do,” Pete says, and she gives him a grim smile.  
  
“Then I think they’re going to come back, and I think when they do they won’t be content to stay in the shadows.” She closes the file and returns it to the stack in front of her. “I think they’ve had enough of being the monsters under the bed.”  
  
There is a whisper of sound from behind her, a small catch of breath in a small throat. Rose turns in her chair just in time to see an equally small hand clutch at the doorframe and then disappear. They all stare at the empty corridor and listen to the rhythmic pounding of Matthew’s bare feet against wood as he runs up the stairs.  
  
 _Serves you right for teaching a five-year-old to listen at doors_ , she thinks and turns back to the table, avoiding her mother’s eyes.  
  
“Shit,” Mickey says, his voice low. “How much do you think he heard?”  
  
Jackie Tyler fixes her daughter with a hard, fierce look. “You,” she says in a voice that only a madman would contradict, “are going to make this better. You brought this nonsense into my house and you are going to make it go away again, do you understand?”  
  
Rose nods silently and pushes her chair back from the table. Mickey and Jake wear identical guilty expressions, but in truth they all know that this is her fault. That this would never have happened before.  
  
Pete gives her a gentle half-smile, and though it is little more than a small quirk at the corner of his mouth she knows that he thinks he understands. “We’ll talk about this tomorrow.”  
  
“Eastman’s going to be somewhat less than pleased,” Jake says.  
  
Pete shrugs. “You went over his head. He’s going to want to stick you lot on desk duty for the rest of your natural lives.”   
  
Mickey turns to Jake, his expression tragic. “So much for maintaining my manly physique.”  
  
Rose rises from her chair, and when they all turn to look at her she finds she suddenly doesn’t quite know what to do with her hands. She tugs at the rumpled skirt of her cocktail dress and wishes she had pockets. “I don’t know what to tell Matthew,” she says. “I’m not going to lie.”  
  
Jackie snorts. “Well, you’re certainly not going to tell him the truth. Bogeymen, my fine arse.”  
  
Matthew’s bedroom is in the east wing of the house, just down the hall from Pete and Jackie’s suite. The corridor is dim, thick with an airless silence, and for a moment her brother is just another shadow, a delicate silhouette framed by an open door. He stands unnaturally still, staring into the room.   
  
Then he wipes his nose with his sleeve and says, “Everyone knows there’s no such thing as monsters.”  
  
Rose walks down the corridor, the thick carpet swallowing the sound of her footsteps. She stands behind him in the doorway and follows his gaze.  
  
He’s watching the shadows under his bed.  
  
“No such thing,” he says again. “I’m not a little kid. I don’t believe in that stuff.”  
  
She leans against the doorframe. “You know about the Cybermen.”  
  
Matthew shakes his head. “That was ages and ages ago.” He chews a little on his bottom lip. “Anyway, that wasn’t monsters. That was just people.”  
  
Rose crouches down and rests a hand on his shoulder. “Matthew,” she says, but he doesn’t look away from the bed. “Matthew, look at me.”  
  
He turns his head, but his eyes are drawn back to the empty room. His face is pale.  
  
She stands. “All right, then. The direct approach it is.” She slips past him and walks to the centre of the room. Matthew only has time for a small sound of protest before she drops to the floor and slides under the bed on her stomach.  
  
It’s a tight fit, and the dust makes her nose twitch. She rolls onto her back, slips one hand beneath her head. His stocking feet appear at the side of the bed, and after a moment’s hesitation he gets down on his hands and knees and crawls in after her. His elbow jabs her in the side and he sneezes. They’re quiet for a long moment, together in the dark.  
  
“I wasn’t scared,” Matthew says. “Not really.”  
  
There’s a bit of dust stuck in her right eye, and she squints at the wooden slats over her face. “Okay,” she says.  
  
“I wasn’t.”  
  
“I believe you.” She rolls her head to one side and meets his eyes in the dim light. “I was.” She turns back to the underside of the bed, shrugging. “Still am, I suppose.”  
  
Matthew makes a small, angry sound in the back of his throat. “That’s a lie. You’re lying ‘cause you think it’ll make me feel better, but I _told_ you: I wasn’t–”  
  
“There are monsters,” Rose says, and the room is quiet. “Real monsters. Sometimes they look like you think they should and sometimes they look just like you and me, and sometimes they hide in the dark, in wardrobes and under beds.” She sniffs. “Probably not under this one, though. It’s a bit cramped.”  
  
“Rose–”  
  
“When I say I’m scared, Mattie, I’m not lying to make you feel better. If I were going to lie, I would tell you that there’s nothing to be scared of, that monsters are just make-believe and stories. I would tell stupid jokes and try to make you laugh and hope that you’d forget what you heard today.” She looks back at him, at his child’s face in shadow. “I should lie to you, but I’m not.”  
  
Matthew stares at her. “What’re you scared of?”  
  
She laughs, a low, dry chuckle that is far from reassuring. “Oh, Matthew, the list just goes on and on.”  
  
He frowns. “What about the bogeypeople? Are you scared of them?”  
  
“Nah. I’m worried, but I’m not scared.” She gives him a small smile. “I may not have mentioned this, but in her time your big sister has kicked some serious monster butt.”  
  
Matthew curls into her side, his fingers tugging at the sleeve of her dress. “What about that man?”  
  
She blinks down at him. “What man is this, then?”  
  
He sighs, as if she is being deliberately obtuse. “The man who hurt you. The man who made you sick. Are you scared of him?”  
  
Rose swallows around the sudden sharpness in her throat. “Matthew–”  
  
“You still have bad dreams. I can hear you.” He looks at her with wide eyes. “You said that you dream about him.”  
  
Out of the corner of her eye she sees the flicker of light, the pulse of golden thread shimmering behind her brother’s ribs. _(She tries so hard not to see it. Not to be tempted.)_ “No,” she says, “I’m not scared of him.” She closes her eyes, and light lingers in the darkness. “Not of him. Not anymore.”  
  
Matthew shifts impatiently. “Well, what are you scared of?”  
  
She opens her eyes and lays her hand over his tiny chest, her fingertips resting against the buttons of his pyjama top. Thin strands of gold caress her palm, twining into the spaces between her fingers, and her breath stills in her throat. _I could do it,_ she thinks. _I could save him. I could change this.  
  
I could change everything._  
  
“Rose,” Matthew says, shaking her arm. “Rose, you all right? You’re…” He drags his hand across his face, under his nose. She mirrors the gesture, and smears something warm and wet over her face.  
  
When she looks down at her fingers, they are red with blood.


	2. Chapter 2

_There are many ways to tell a story, child. This is one.  
  
Once there was a girl. She was small and fierce and she stared so long at the sky that one cold night she opened her mouth and swallowed a star. She hid it away under her skin, and if you looked very, very closely, you could see the sunlight in her eyes.   
  
But little girls aren’t meant to carry stars inside them, you know. It burned everything she touched, and her fingers turned dark with ash.   
  
You may wonder, my dear, why anyone would be so foolish. The answer is quite simple.   
  
Love, of course._  
  
++  
  
“Drink this,” she says, and holds out a large plastic cup with a pink straw sticking out from the top.  
  
The Master looks from the 7-Eleven Big Gulp to the face of the creature offering it. He smiles. “You are even stupider than I remember,” he says, “if you think I’m going to drink anything you give me.”   
  
She rolls her eyes, and the whites shine large and moon-pale in her thin face. “It’s Mountain Dew,” she says. “ _Just_ Mountain Dew — it’s not drugged or poisoned or anything. You’ve just come back from the dead; you need the sugar.” She leans forward and drops the cup carelessly at his feet. “I’m not interested in revenge.”  
  
He doesn’t believe her, but he reaches for the cup anyway. The plastic is cool and damp under his fingers, and the ice within rattles with every tremor of his hand. He rests the straw against his closed mouth and watches her face.   
  
In the sickly yellow glow of the streetlights she looks less like a girl and more like some foreign, ignorant mind’s approximation of what a girl should be — like a boat built by a man who’d only read stories about the sea. There is something unnatural in the tilt of her head and the turn of her ankles, in the angles of her elbows and knees. The parts are all correct and accounted for _(knee bone connected to the thigh bone, thigh bone connected to the hip bone)_ but in the whole there is something lacking. Something wrong.  
  
“You’re not Rose Tyler,” he says, and she smiles.  
  
“I’ve been wondering about that myself, actually.” Her skin is stretched too tightly over the bones of her face, but her lips are pink and wet and frame her white, white teeth as she grins down at him. “I _look_ like me, more or less.” She tweaks her own nose. “I feel like me.” She sniffs the sleeve of her t-shirt and grimaces. “I smell like me. A me who hasn’t showered for a few universes, but me nonetheless.” She rests her elbow on her knee, cradles her chin in the palm of her hand. “Not so sure about what’s inside, though. Could be almost anything in there.” Her grin widens. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t invite you to take a look.”   
  
He is naked and cold and clutching a Big Gulp in his shaking hands, and there is really only one question to ask. “Why did you do this?”   
  
She is suddenly, eerily expressionless. “Why,” she says. “Why, not _how_.”  
  
“I know how,” he lies.   
  
He does not see her stand, does not hear her bare feet touch dirt, but she is crouched before him, painted fingernails digging into the pale skin of his knee. She could draw blood if she wished; she doesn’t, yet. Now that she is close _(her smell is worse than rubbish, worse than the week-old hot dogs left to rot)_ he sees something in her eyes that he hadn’t before.   
  
The smallest glimmer, hidden in the dark, of a familiar golden light.   
  
“Once upon a time,” the thing with Rose Tyler’s face says, “a very long time ago, you made me a promise.” Her hand leaves his knee, curls around his fingers and the cool plastic of the cup. “I brought you back so you could keep it.”  
  
Then her grip tightens and with one violent thrust she shoves the straw into his mouth.   
  
“Drink up,” she says, and grins.   
  
++  
  
 _I do not want you to think, child, that the darkness is all there is. We would not fear the dark if we did not live in the light, for most of our days. It is in the light that we learn to hold things close, to touch warm hands to warmer skin and to listen for the gentle rise and fall of well-loved voices.  
  
Without the light, we would have little to lose._   
  
++  
  
Mickey collapses onto the foot of her bed with a pronounced ‘oomph’. He pats the duvet until he finds the lump of blanket and bed sheet that contains her left foot. He squeezes it.   
  
“I’ve come,” he says, “to take you away from all this.”  
  
“The heavens be praised,” Rose says without looking up from her laptop. “Shall I fetch the wedding dress from the wardrobe and have Mama call for the preacher?”   
  
“Actually, I think we should elope.”   
  
She looks at him over the top of her computer screen. “Mickey Smith. You cad.”  
  
He shrugs, squeezes her foot again. “It’s late. Whatcha working on?”   
  
“Nothing,” she says. He gives her a look, and she adds, “Some paperwork Eastman’s requested. Drudgery and red tape, in triplicate.”   
  
“That prick.” He shakes his head. “It’s the bogeyman case. He wants you too busy to worry about things that go bump in the night.”   
  
“No kidding.” She sets her laptop aside and tucks her hands beneath the sheets, hiding them from view. The tremors are worse at night, and Mickey is always watching, these days. “And how was your afternoon at the London Zoo?”   
  
“Not so good,” he says, rubbing a hand over his face. “Jake was right.”   
  
“Thought you said Jake was being a prissy little girl.”   
  
“He was, but he was also right.” Mickey pauses, hesitates a moment too long before saying, “It was awful, Rose.”   
  
Her bottom lip is slightly chapped; she bites down on it and feels it sting. She smiles a little _(still stinging)_ and says, “Lions and tigers and bears, oh my?”   
  
He sits up. “I’m serious. There weren’t any of those natural habitat things they have at the zoos at home. It was just cages, all metal bars and straw on the floor, and some of the bigger animals…” He looks down, suddenly fascinated by the pattern of the duvet. He tugs at a loose string. “You never really think of them as dangerous, the lions and the tigers and whatever. In movies and stuff, yeah, but you grow up seeing them on school trips, snoozing away like a house cat in a good bit of sunlight, and you forget.”   
  
For a moment, he is lost in thought. Rose nudges him with her foot. “Forget what?”   
  
He nudges her back. “I wish you had come with us. It would have been better for Matthew, if you’d been there.”  
  
Rose bristles. “I had to work, Mickey, and I didn’t know you were taking the kid into the dark fucking heart of Africa.”   
  
He looks entirely unimpressed, with both her language and her excuse. “We spent most of the afternoon in the reptile house. He was fine.” He leans forward, elbows resting on his knees. “Rose, why are you avoiding him?”  
  
“Don’t be daft,” she says, but she can’t keep the lie from her voice. “I’m not.”   
  
He sighs. “Rose–”  
  
“I’m not avoiding him, Mickey. I’ve just got things to do, that’s all.” She pulls her knees to her chest. “Does he think–”  
  
“He thinks that you’re his big sister, and that every time you go to the office you single handedly stop the world from falling apart at the seams.” He pauses. “Also, you can fly like a superhero, shoot laser beams out of your eyes, and were the sole mastermind behind the invention of mint chocolate chip ice cream.”   
  
She shrugs, smiling. “He’s five-years-old.”   
  
Mickey doesn’t smile back. “He is. Which is why I was sort of surprised when on the ride home today he interrupted a perfectly entertaining conversation about radioactive spiders to tell me a secret. To confess.”   
  
Dread settles in her stomach like a stone. “Mickey–”  
  
“He looked so guilty, and I thought, ‘Geez, the little guy’s probably all worked up because he fed his vegetables to the dog or spilled juice on your mum’s favorite rug or something.’ It was all I could do to keep a straight face.”   
  
He glances down for a moment, and when he looks up again she is sure that he knows everything.   
  
“And then he said that it wasn’t really his secret at all, but he had to tell me, just _had_ to — even though his brilliant big sister had made him promise. Even though she’d made him swear.” The line of his mouth relents, curving into a sharp, humourless smile. “Cross his heart and hope to die.”   
  
Rose turns away. “What did he tell you?”   
  
“The morning after Jackie’s party–”  
  
She laughs a little, the sound thin and high. “God, is that all? That was just a nosebleed, Mickey. That was nothing.”   
  
“He said you couldn’t make it stop. That you went through two bath towels and a box of tissues trying to soak up all the blood.”   
  
“Oh, come on.” Her tone is incredulous, slightly forced. “I would have passed out if I’d–”   
  
“He’s five-years-old, Rose! He’s a _child_. What the hell were you thinking, making him keep a secret like that?”  
  
“I didn’t have a choice.”   
  
He swings his legs off the side of the bed and stands. “Yeah, you did. You could’ve told me. You could’ve come to me, to Jake, and we would’ve kept Jackie and Pete and the Institute out of it, if you’d wanted. We could have helped.” He sits beside her, his knee against her hip and his eyes wide. “We still can, Rose. You just have to talk to me.” He swallows. “Please.”  
  
This isn’t the first time he’s asked, and it isn’t the first time she’s wanted to answer. The words are like a weight at the back of her throat, and even if she were able to give them voice she wouldn’t know where to begin. The screensaver on her laptop switches on, and lines of light and shadow dance over his familiar features. She rests her forehead against the curve of his shoulder and closes her eyes. “I will, Mickey,” she says. “I promise I will. But not tonight.”   
  
His hands grip her arms, but he doesn’t push her away. “That’s not good enough.”  
  
“All right.” She sits back a little, meets his eyes. “I’ll see the doctors again. Tomorrow, if you want. I’ll put on the paper dress and let them poke and prod me to their hearts’ content. I’ll take every pill they want to give me, and I won’t even complain.” She gives him a hesitant, hopeful smile. “Well, not much.”   
  
His eyes are hard, but she can see that he’s already given in. “And you’ll tell me what’s going on. _Soon_.” He squeezes her shoulder. “You promise?”  
  
Her hands are still shaking, so she gives him a quick peck on the lips to seal the deal. “I promise.”   
  
He grins, and looks about fifteen years old. “Flirt.”  
  
“Stud.” She presses her face to his shoulder again. He feels like he always has, solid and real and _hers_ , and for a moment she is dangerously close to something like tears. She swallows against the thickness in her throat. “Mickey, I don’t sleep well.”   
  
“I know, babe.” His hands are warm against her back, and she sighs into his collar. “You want me to stay for a while?”   
  
“Yeah. That’d be good.” She pulls away and wipes her eyes. He pretends not to notice. “I don’t know, though,” she says. “You’re a bit too much of a temptation. What if I can’t keep my hands to myself?”  
  
He sighs. “You wouldn’t be the first.” He flops back onto her pillow, pulling her down the headboard until she’s curled against his chest. “It’s all right. I’m resigned to being entirely irresistible.”   
  
“We all have our crosses to bear.” She brushes her palm over the soft grey cotton of his shirtfront and watches the rise and fall of his chest. Thinks of heart and lungs and the strong cage of his ribs, of muscle and flesh and skin — all hidden from her eyes, revealing nothing of what’s to come. She kisses his cheek. “Thanks, Mick.”   
  
“Don’t mention it,” he says into her hair, and she falls asleep to the steady sound of his heart.  
  
+  
  
She dreams.  
  
She stands in an empty street, houses of colourless brick to each side and a grey sky above. Telephone poles and long, black lines stretching into the distance. She walks, and cannot hear her own footsteps over the silence.   
  
A bird lands at her feet.   
  
It’s a crow, fat and dark with a sharp, glinting beak. It twists its head and fixes her with one bead-like eye. “Caw,” it says.   
  
She crouches, her elbows resting on her knees. “That’s not right. Birds don’t say caw.”   
  
It blinks at her. “You would prefer a rousing chorus of _Nevermore!_ , I suppose.”  
  
“That’s a raven.”  
  
“My, aren’t we the picky little princess tonight?” It takes a moment to straighten its ruffled feathers. When it’s finished, it gives a small, birdlike shrug. “You’re going to die soon, you know.”  
  
She drags her teeth over her bottom lip, then tries to smile. “Everything dies.”  
  
Birds cannot frown, but the crow comes remarkably close. “That’s all you have to say? I bestow foreknowledge of your terrible fate, and you repeat some Zen bullshit you learned from the Crazy One with the Ears?” It hops a little, annoyed. “Sheesh.”  
  
“It’s true, though,” she says. “I mean, death? Pretty much the norm.”  
  
“Yeah,” it says, “but yours is going to be awful.”  
  
“Okay.”  
  
“Really, _really_ awful.”   
  
“If it makes you feel better.”   
  
“Oh, it will, princess, believe you me. After all, we’ve been waiting.”   
  
It happens so fast that she registers the pain before the movement; the crow’s beak is buried in the flesh of her foot, blood seeping through the canvas of her trainers. She watches, paralyzed, as the bird rips free a chunk of meat and skin and chokes it back, its black throat convulsing as it swallows.   
  
The crow closes its beak and opens it again, savouring the taste. “Not bad,” it says. “Still needs salt, though.”   
  
Then she looks up, and the street is dark with birds.   
  
Thousands of small, feathered bodies, watching from every rooftop, from every stunted suburban tree. The telephone lines sway beneath their weight, and every glassy eye is fixed on her.   
  
The crow makes a low, pleased sound. “Once upon a time,” he says, “there was a girl, and she was hollow inside. A fire burned in her head, in her breast, and it turned her heart to ash.” It chuckles. “She never loved again.”   
  
There is tiny bead of golden light within the crow’s chest, and she reaches past feather and skin and bone and pinches the knotted thread between her thumb and forefinger. “Don’t take this personally,” she says, “but _shut up_.”  
  
She pulls, and the knot unravels.   
  
The crow stares at her, stunned, and the thread begins to burn. It coils in her palm, a slim cord of blue flame that twines about her fingers and spills out onto the street, lengthening into a web of light that binds a thousand burning knots in a thousand feathered chests. Then, one by one, those lights go out.   
  
At first, she doesn’t understand. The golden thread burns her skin and there is sound like the low ripple of approaching thunder, like–  
  
“Like drums?” The crow laughs. “Oh no, pussycat. This one was all you.” It bows to her, ironically. “My compliments.”   
  
Birds fall from the rooftops, from the trees and the telephone lines. Their bodies hit the asphalt with small, hollow sounds that swell into a wave — like a drumbeat. Like the storm. Soon the sky is empty, the street silent and dark with dead, feathered things.   
  
The crow hops onto her uninjured foot and looks up at her. “Hey, what do you call the last carrion bird alive?” It grins, hunger in its eyes. “One lucky bastard.”  
  
She bends down, puts her face close to its sharp beak. “You made me do that.”  
  
“I didn’t. You wanted to.” It presses its beak against her nose briefly, like a kiss. “You liked it.”   
  
The coil of thread has gone cold, and she crushes it in her fist. “ _Liar_.”   
  
It snorts. “Oh, like that’s news.” It studies her for a long moment, and then says, “I’m not him, you know. Not properly.”  
  
“I know.”   
  
“Good. You’re such a confused little thing; I like to make sure you’re following along.” The crow opens its wings and flutters a few steps away to inspect one of the corpses. It nudges the head with its beak, staring down into the dark, empty gloss of the dead bird’s eye. The crow looks up, a quizzical twist of neck and head. “Do you think he dreams of wolves?”  
  
 _I hope so_ , she doesn’t say. “I think he’s dead.”   
  
“Well, you’re young.” The dead bird’s eye pops, wetly, and the crow dances from foot to foot in celebration. “Did you hear that? That was _brilliant_.”   
  
She covers her mouth with one hand. “I think I’m going to wake up now.”   
  
“Fine, have it your way. Spoilsport.” The crow lurches into the air, an ungraceful arc of flight that ends when its claws snag on her jumper. Its feet grip her shoulder, and it curls into her neck, feathers sharp against her skin. “When you die,” it says, “I’m going to save your eyes for last. I know, I know — not the usual way of things, not for a greedy bugger like myself, but I’ve a plan, you see. I’m going to eat you from the inside out. Start with your guts, your bladder and intestines and stomach — not that you’re exactly using them, these days — and work my way up to your lungs and lymph nodes.” It nips affectionately at her ear. “Your heart will be gone already, of course, and your brain really isn’t worth the bother. Empty calories, as they say.”  
  
She stares blankly ahead at the grey horizon. “And then?”   
  
“And then,” he says, lips brushing the curve of her ear, “I’ll finish with your eyes. Pluck them from your skull and stare into the flames burning in the spaces left behind. In the dark.” His fingers snag in her hair, gently tugging her face towards his. “Rose, look at me.”  
  
She closes her eyes. “No.”  
  
He chuckles and traces the line of her jaw with one cool finger. “I can wait. Sooner or later, love, the caged animal always turns on itself.”  
  
She wakes to an empty bed.  
  
++   
  
_You will be afraid.  
  
You think, my child, that you have grown too old to fear the dark. And yes, you are as strong and as brave as stars, as the flesh of the heart and electric hum of the mind. You are the body — the hands and the feet, the kidneys and toenails. The will, and the wish. Small as you are, my love, you stand tall in the light.  
  
You are nothing here._  
  
++  
  
She’s going to kill Mickey.   
  
When he made her an appointment with the med division rookie, she chuckled and chalked it up to poor strategising on his part. True, she has every senior physician at the Institute more or less wrapped around her little finger, but this woman is fresh out of her residency and as green as they come. Surely, Rose had thought, she’ll be more concerned with making a good impression on the boss’s daughter than with any sort of irregularities that might pop up during the exam.   
  
Mickey is much too clever for his own good.   
  
The young doctor fixes Rose with a baleful look. “You,” she says, “have been falsifying your bimonthly physicals.”   
  
Rose tugs at the collar of her paper exam gown. “ _Falsifying_ is an awfully strong word.”   
  
“What word would you use, Operative Tyler?”   
  
“Please stop calling me that. It makes me want to wear dark glasses and start wiretapping phones.”   
  
The corner of the doctor’s mouth twitches, but she doesn’t smile. “You have a body temperature of 103 degrees.”  
  
“I have a _what_?” She stops, remembers. “Oh, yeah. Fahrenheit.” She shakes her head. “I’ll never get used to that.”   
  
The doctor scribbles something on her clipboard; Rose thinks she spots the word _delirium_ before the other woman catches her looking. “Even in Fahrenheit,” she says, “it’s rather worrying.”  
  
Rose smiles. “You know, I’ve been feeling a bit under the weather recently. Maybe I have a cold?”  
  
“The sort of cold, I suppose, that skips over all that runny nose business and presents as insomnia, total loss of appetite, and excessive nosebleeds.” The doctor flips through a few pages of Rose’s medical file. “When was your last period?”   
  
Rose’s poker face fails her; she stiffens. “It’s been a while.”   
  
“How long is _a while_?”  
  
Two years, give or take a few months. Rose forces a grin. “Look, Doctor–” she glances at the woman’s security badge, “Dr. Jones, I’m the picture of health. Yeah, I don’t tuck into the fried foods quite like I used to, but you can see for yourself that I’m not exactly malnourished. And honestly — nosebleeds?”   
  
Jones gives her a steady, unreadable look. “Operative Tyler–”  
  
“Rose.”  
  
“If you like.” She sits back in her chair and crosses her legs at the ankles. “Rose, your hands are shaking.”  
  
Rose looks down. “So they are.” She curls her fingers into fists and laughs. “Need to cut back on the fags, I guess.”  
  
“You don’t smoke.”   
  
“Then maybe I need to start.” She’s about to say something defensive and possibly rather rude when the florescent lights overhead flicker, then go dark. Rose tenses, relaxing only slightly when the emergency lights fill the room with an eerie blue glow. She drops down from the exam table and reaches for her clothes. “We’ve gone into lockdown.”   
  
Jones slides her chair over to the computer terminal. “You’re right. The entrances have been sealed, and we’re on emergency power.” The telephone rings, and she answers, her voice perfectly cool. “Jones, medical division.” There’s a pause, and she nods. “Yeah, she’s still here. Hold on.” She holds out the phone. “It’s Mickey.”   
  
Rose hops over, one leg in her trousers, one out. She cradles the phone between her shoulder and her ear and wriggles her way into her clothes. “Tell me it’s not those idiots down in R &D and their teleporting fire salamanders.”   
  
Mickey’s voice is low and strained. “It’s not R&D. It’s not anything. There’s no security breach.”   
  
“Then why the hell–”  
  
“I’m working on it. You need to get up here.”   
  
She wobbles on one foot, trying to tie her shoelaces. “I need to find my bra.”  
  
He clears his throat. “Rose, there’s something else.”   
  
“Something more important than my bra?” Jones waves the underwired item in question, and Rose gives her a grin. “Ta. I never save the world without one. Well, except that one time.”   
  
Mickey makes an annoyed noise in her ear. “Would you focus, please?”  
  
She pulls her t-shirt over her head, nearly dropping the phone. “Right, sorry. Something else?”   
  
“Just before the lockdown, we got a report from an amateur in the States.”   
  
“Jake’s guy in Nevada?”  
  
“Yeah. He’s a nutter, but he knows his stuff.” He pauses. “Rose, we’ve got something in orbit.”  
  
Her blood doesn’t run cold; it boils. She leans back against the wall and folds her arms, tucking her shaking hands against her sides. “That’s impossible. We would have known.”   
  
“We didn’t.”  
  
The hard plastic of the phone digs into her ear, into her shoulder. She lowers her voice. “Mickey, when we’re in lockdown–”  
  
“Yeah, I know.” He chuckles, but there’s little humour in the sound. “The phrase ‘sitting ducks’ comes to mind.”  
  
She closes her eyes, and the unnatural silence of the building around her sizzles and pops in her ears. “Who could initiate a lockdown without the standard security protocols?”   
  
He hesitates. “Pete. A few of the department heads.”   
  
Her anger is like a searing light against the inside of her eyelids, brutal and unrelenting. She can barely force the next word through her teeth. “Eastman?”   
  
There’s a silence. “Yes.” She hears the indistinct rise and fall of Jake’s voice, and Mickey covers the receiver to reply. “Rose, you know we have to be sure. We can’t just–”  
  
“He’d still be in the building. It’s not something he could do remotely. He’s trapped himself in here with us.”   
  
“We need to be sure. Before we do anything, we need proof.”  
  
“Get it. I’ll meet you outside his office.” Rose lets the phone fall from her shoulder to her hands and slams it into the cradle. “Dr. Jones.”   
  
She stands. “Operative Tyler.”   
  
Rose gives her a thin smile. “I’m sorry, but it seems I’m needed upstairs. I have to go tie my boss to a chair and ask him a few pointed questions about an unidentified spaceship currently in orbit around the planet. Maybe we can reschedule for next week?”   
  
“I’ll have my office call your office.”   
  
“You’re a peach.” She grabs her jumper from the exam table and turns to go.   
  
“Rose?”   
  
She stops. “Yeah?”  
  
Jones tucks her hands into the pockets of her lab coat. “Eastman favours his left knee — I think it must be an old injury. If you’re careful, you should be able to scare him without doing any permanent damage.”   
  
Rose grins. “And if I want to do permanent damage?”   
  
“Then I have a colleague in Psych I can refer you to,” she says, and it almost sounds like a joke.   
  
Rose laughs anyway, and walks out the door.   
  
++  
  
 _I have a hundred stories to tell you, my love. A hundred hundred. I could hold you close and tell you stories for nights unending, speak until my voice cracked and faded and our bones turned to dust. A thousand thousand stories, child, each perfect and terrible and full of darkness.  
  
They would all end the same way._  
  
++  
  
When Jake and Mickey arrive on the top floor, their boss is unconscious and bound to a chair. Rose stands in the middle of his office, arms folded over her chest.   
  
Mickey slams the door closed behind them and leans against it. “Holy shit, Rose. Have you lost your mind?”   
  
“He was expecting me,” she says, and tosses a handgun and its clip onto the desk.   
  
Mickey gapes at her, at the rumpled, balding man tied to the chair. “He tried to _shoot_ you?”  
  
She hops up onto the desk and shrugs. “Set me up for a great pun about firing and firearms, but I was too busy slamming his head against the wall to refine it.”   
  
Jake checks Eastman’s pulse. “How about, ‘I’ve heard that unemployment is a killer, but this is ridiculous’?”   
  
She chuckles. “Or maybe, ‘If this is your idea of termination, I suppose there’s not much point in asking for a reference.’” Eastman groans, a sad little sound from the back of his throat. Rose runs her tongue along her front teeth and crosses her legs at the knee. “Oh, good. Now we can have a little talk.”   
  
Jake steps back and leans against the edge of the desk, his head by her shoulder. “Rose,” he says in an undertone, “are you enjoying this?”   
  
“Not yet,” she says. She takes a sterling silver letter opener from the desk and uses it to clean her fingernails. “Mr. Eastman? Are you awake, sir?” His repose continues, though she’s fairly sure he’s playing possum. She allows him a moment, and turns to look out the window.   
  
All the offices on the top floor have impressive views; behind Eastman’s desk there is a wall of glass that looks out over the Thames, over the harbor and airships and sky. The pale mid-morning sun mingles with the blue of the emergency lights, casting shadows. It looks as if it might rain.   
  
Eastman opens his eyes. He doesn’t look at his restraints, at Mickey or at Jake. His eyes fix on her, unblinking. “What the fuck,” he says, “did you do to my knee?”  
  
She smiles. “I kicked it.” She leans forward slightly, as if to impart an important truth. “With my foot.”   
  
He tugs at his restraints. “No shit.”  
  
Rose turns to Mickey and Jake, who watch her with guarded concern. “I think he’s lowering the whole tone of the conversation, don’t you?” She tosses the letter opener from one hand to the other and meets Eastman’s glare. “You use awfully strong language for a bureaucrat in a bowtie.”  
  
He scowls. “You’re awfully cheap for an heiress.”   
  
“Good one, sir. Very cutting.” She raises the letter opener and slips down from the desk. “Speaking of.”   
  
Mickey steps forward. “Rose.”   
  
She pats his shoulder. “Don’t worry, Mick. I’ll fill out all the relevant paperwork after I’m done.” She walks over to the chair and crouches at Eastman’s feet. She taps the letter opener lightly against his left knee, and he flinches. “What do you think of my nails, sir?”   
  
He stares at her. “Your what?”  
  
“My fingernails. I painted them the other day.” She raises her right hand, and the red varnish is murky in the low light. “Not my usual colour. Cheap though I may be, I usually go in for something subtler. Had to borrow the varnish from my mum.” She pauses, looks at him as if seeing him for the first time. “You’ve met my mum.”   
  
He swallows. “Yes. I have.”   
  
“You’ve been to her parties. Throws a wonderful party, my mum.” Rose digs the tip of the letter opener into his thigh and leans in. “You’ve met my brother.”   
  
She can smell his sweat, salt and expensive cologne and panic; it’s intoxicating. He’s breathing hard. “Listen, Tyler–”  
  
“In my experience, sir, the person _not_ tied to a chair directs the conversation.”   
  
“You’re not going to hurt me,” he says, his voice high-pitched and almost shaking. He nods at Mickey and Jake. “They won’t let you.”   
  
She grins and presses the letter opener hard into Eastman’s leg. “Boys, could you give us a minute? The boss man and I have something to discuss in private.”  
  
Mickey’s about to argue, but Jake takes him by the elbow and leads him to the door. He nods at Rose, his expression inscrutable. “We’ll be just outside.”   
  
She shakes a finger at him. “No eavesdropping, now. Remember your manners.”  
  
Eastman lurches forward, and the chair screeches against the floor. Mickey and Jake stop by the door, uncertain. “You can’t leave me here with her,” Eastman says, panting. “You can’t, you know what she’ll — _look at her_.”  
  
His eyes are round and white, and beads of sweat form high on his scalp, on his bruised forehead. He quivers, a small stinking heap of a man, and part of her pities him.   
  
The rest watches the silver glint of the letter opener and wishes for something sharper.  
  
“I didn’t have a choice,” he says. Pleads. “It was after the Cybermen, and I’d just lost — my wife was converted, died, and I have a daughter, a son. When those things came to me, when they told me what they wanted–”  
  
The blade of the letter opener may be dull, but it looks lovely against the soft skin of his throat. “You know, sir, I can’t say I really care why. I imagine they offered to spare your family, or something like that — some promise they never would have bothered to keep. Like I said, unimportant. What is important — and this should sound familiar, as it was your evil plan all along — is that you’ve blinded and crippled us, robbed us of every defense just as the wolves arrived at the door. What’s important is what you do now.” She steps back and drops the letter opener. It clatters to the floor. “It’s not too late to stop this.”   
  
He closes his eyes and takes a few shuddering breaths. When he opens his eyes again, his face is impassive beneath its sheen of sweat. “Mormolykeion,” he says.   
  
She exchanges a bemused look with Mickey and Jake. “Um. Gesundheit?”   
  
“It’s what they call themselves. The name they chose from a human tongue.” He sits back in the chair and holds her gaze. “You call them the bogeymen.”  
  
The room is silent. “They’re here for the children,” she says.  
  
“As many as that ship of theirs can hold.” He almost smiles. “It’s a big fucking ship.”  
  
The letter opener is still at her feet, a temptation; she turns on her heel and closes the distance between her and her friends. “All right,” she says. “How do we end the lockdown and bring our defense systems back online?”   
  
Mickey stares at her, silent. After an awkward moment, Jake answers. “Don’t think we can. He was clever about it — every security override we run fails.” He rubs his hand over his mouth, and for a heartbeat his composure slips. “We can’t even warn them. Mobile signals blocked, no internet, no outside calls. Even those long range teleport prototypes in R &D are buggered.”   
  
Rose shrugs. “Well, it’s not like they ever worked to begin with.” She can feel Mickey’s eyes on her, and she turns to him. “I’m sorry, do I have something on my face?”   
  
“No.”  
  
“Then what’s your problem?”  
  
He looks away. “It’s nothing. Forget it.”   
  
She sighs. “Mickey, if you think I staged an alien invasion just to get out of my doctor’s appointment–”  
  
“Shut up, Rose. Just shut up.” He takes a deep breath and it hisses through his teeth. “This isn’t funny. This isn’t fun. What you just did, what you almost–”  
  
Jake stops him with a hand on his arm. “We needed to know what we’re dealing with. She did what needed to be done.”   
  
“She didn’t need to like it.”   
  
Rose feels the words like a slap, and her eyes sting. “I _didn’t_.”   
  
He pulls away from Jake, crossing his arms over his chest. “Okay. Whatever.”   
  
“I had to scare him, Mickey. He had to believe I would do it.” She steps in close, forcing him to look into her face. “I wouldn’t.”  
  
He watches her carefully, a boy she’s known all her life standing before her with a scale in his eyes. He judges her, weighing the girl he knows against the pale, hungry-eyed thing in her place. She can still hear Eastman breathe, his slight wheeze as he exhales, and she feels his betrayal _(his weakness)_ like a pulse under her skin. She wants to hurt him.   
  
She wants to, but she won’t. She never would.   
  
Mickey nods, and the tightness in her chest eases. _(If he believes her, it must be true.)_ He takes her hand, squeezes hard. “Sorry, babe. Suppose you’re just a better actress than you used to be.”  
  
His fingers are warm in hers, and she holds on for a long moment before letting him go. She steps back, rolling her eyes. “Oh, honestly. One botched Nativity play and a girl’s dramatic reputation is ruined for life.”   
  
He turns to Jake, smirking. “You think she’s a terror now? Picture her at fourteen, popping her gum and playing the Virgin Mary with a pillow shoved up her dress. It was a Christmas nightmare.” He stops suddenly, his gaze turning inward. He raises a finger, a slow grin spreading across his face. “I think,” he says softly, “that I’m about to be brilliant.”  
  
He strides across the office, stopping just in front of Eastman’s chair. His hands settle on his hips and he gives the bound man a trademark Mickey Smith scowl. “All right, enough talk. Where is it?”   
  
Eastman pales slightly. “Where’s what?”   
  
Mickey rests one hand on the back of the chair, just over Eastman’s shoulder, and leans in. “The transmat device they gave you, of course. What kind of world-invading creepy crawlies would they be if they didn’t keep a close eye on their very own pet traitor?” His smile shows teeth. “What do you think we are, stupid?”  
  
The other man half-shrugs, his arms still tied to the chair. “Yes, actually. That’s exactly what I think.”   
  
“Oh.” He steps back. “Well, you’re wrong.”  
  
Jake joins him. “To be fair, it’s a common mistake. But in reality, _he_ ,” Jake nods at Mickey, “has hidden depths, she’s just as brilliant as she is barmy, and I’m laconic, not stupid.”   
  
Rose smiles. “So. The transmat?”   
  
Eastman glowers at them. “You know perfectly well that the lockdown prevents any sort of transmissions in or out of the building.”   
  
Mickey chuckles. “We can barely keep track of a couple of teleporting salamanders; I somehow doubt our transmission barriers are up to freaky alien standards.”   
  
Jake turns away, shaking his head. “No. If he had a working transmat, he would’ve left the moment the lockdown took effect.”  
  
“Unless,” Rose says, “he had to assemble it first.” She strides over to the desk and begins to search each drawer. “When I broke in, he was sitting here. Maybe I interrupted him.” She gives a locked drawer a sharp kick, and it falls open. “After all, you can’t just leave a piece of advanced alien technology lying around the Institute — never know who might come along and try to catalog it.” She finds two metallic discs buried hastily in a pile of post-it notes, and a third in a secret panel at the back of the locked drawer. She passes the discs off to Mickey and gives Eastman a grin. “Wow. You _really_ suck at hiding things.”   
  
Mickey fits the discs together easily enough, but then he frowns. “No power source. There’s a piece missing.”   
  
She sighs. “Of course there is.” She looks at Eastman, and he looks back, expressionless. “Guys, why don’t you go pack the standard equipment. I’ll find the power source.”  
  
Mickey’s frown deepens. “I don’t think–”  
  
She rests a hand on his shoulder. “Pack one of the teleport prototypes from the lab, would you? Just in case.”   
  
He folds his arms across his chest. “They don’t work. They’ve never worked.”  
  
“Humour me.”   
  
Jake leads Mickey from the room, and as they leave Rose can hear them fall into a familiar argument, bickering about detonators and explosives and the leaky thermos that ruined a box of fuses last week. She and Eastman regard each other silently, listening as their voices fade.  
  
“Something’s wrong with you,” he says.   
  
She sits on the desk, folding her legs beneath her. “That seems to be the consensus, yeah.”   
  
“If it’s any comfort, I’ve _always_ thought there was something wrong with you.”   
  
She thinks for a moment. “You know, that is a bit comforting. Thanks.”   
  
“No problem.” He taps his fingers against the arm of the chair. “The transmat will drop you right into the heart of that ship. You know that, don’t you?”  
  
“That’s the plan.”  
  
He smiles. “Let me guess — you want to talk to them.”   
  
She matches his even gaze. “I have to give them a choice. That’s how it works.”   
  
“That’s how you work.”   
  
She waves the partially assembled transmat device. “From where I sit, sir, you’re in no kind of position to give _anyone_ a lecture on Institute protocol.”   
  
He slouches in the chair and looks to the wall of glass behind her, staring out over the city. “Right now, they’re waiting on my arrival. When they realise I’m not coming, they’ll attack in force. Collect their cargo and be gone by morning.” He meets her eyes. “I didn’t take this job to save the world.”   
  
Rose slips off the desk. “I did.” She reaches down and takes the letter opener from the floor. He flinches, and she rolls her eyes. “Oh, don’t be such a baby. I’m not going to touch you.”   
  
There are any number of excellent hiding places in the large office: lighting fixtures, shelves of never-read books, the obligatory safe hidden behind a Van Gogh print. Rose holds up a small, silver-framed photograph from his desk. “Your kids?”   
  
He nods, his forehead creasing. “Elizabeth and Robert.”  
  
Rose stares at the photo — a boy and a girl, sandy-haired and blue-eyed, wearing stiff-collared shirts and stiffer smiles. “How old are they?”   
  
“She’s twelve, he’s eight.” He shifts uneasily, and the chair creaks. “Look, I really don’t see what they have to do with–”  
  
She jams the point of the letter opener into the back of the frame and begins to pry it open. As she suspected, the frame has been sealed. It opens with a sharp crack, and a small circle of dark metal falls to the floor.   
  
He stares at her. “How did you know?”   
  
“Psychology.” She pinches the circle between her thumb and forefinger and fits it into the hole at the top of the transmat device. The circle pulses white for a moment, then turns a deep red. “Well, would you look at that. An on-switch.” She turns the device over in her hands and studies it closely. “Nifty.” She looks up. “Don’t suppose there’s anything else you’d like to share about our child-nabbing friends? Social dynamics, spaceship schematics, fatal weaknesses, that sort of thing?”   
  
“I don’t know anymore than you.” He pauses. “Well, I know one thing you don’t.”  
  
“What’s that?”   
  
“They’re going to kill you.”   
  
She watches his face silently for a long moment, and then she smiles. “Always did enjoy your pep talks, sir. Very inspirational stuff.” She pulls the photograph from the broken frame and walks over to him. She tucks the photo into his breast pocket. “Elizabeth and Robert Eastman, ages twelve and eight.” She stands, holding his gaze. “If I see them–” She stops. There’s a silence. “I’ll do everything I can. You have my word.”   
  
She walks away.  
  
++   
  
_Listen well, my love. Time grows short.  
  
When you find the darkness — and you will, or it will find you — do not fear. Do not tremble. It is your fear that they crave, those soft sharp things waiting in the dark. They roll your terrors over their tongues like sweets, rotting their teeth, blackening their smiles. They wish you to fear them. Do not.   
  
There are greater things to fear._   
  
++  
  
“All right,” Mickey says. “This is weird.”   
  
They transmat into the dark, into an echoing, empty space. The air is cold and slightly sweet, and they can hear the soft trickle of running water. The stone floor is damp beneath their feet.   
  
Rose shines her torch into the darkness around them; there’s nothing to see. “Jake? Anything to share?”   
  
Jake fiddles with his scanner, a handy bit of alien tech he’d picked up during an interdepartmental poker game. He nods. “We’re definitely on the ship. This room is massive — dome-shaped, judging by the acoustics.” He tucks the scanner back into his kit. “No life signs anywhere in the vicinity. Some sort of holding cell, I’d guess. Don’t think they intended to give Eastman a hero’s welcome.”   
  
Rose shakes her head. “And he’s such a likable guy.” She readjusts her grip on her sidearm. “So. Door?”   
  
They walk until the floor curves gradually upward into a wall. Rose hostlers her gun and presses her hand to the smooth stone. “It’s wet,” she says. She crouches slightly, dragging her palm along the wall and aiming the torchlight in its wake. “There must be water flow from the ceiling.”   
  
Mickey leans forward. “That would explain these places where the stone’s been worn away. Maybe the water, over time–”   
  
Rose runs her fingers over the slight imperfections in the wall. They’re shallow and patternless, thin as the silk of a spider web. “No,” she says, “these marks were scratched into the stone. I wonder–” She stops, watching as her fingernails trace four parallel scratches, fitting them almost perfectly. Without thinking, she pulls her fingers together — not much, just enough to make her hand slightly smaller. As small as a child’s.   
  
She snatches her hand away.   
  
Mickey makes a soft, horrible noise _(because he understands, he always, always does)_ and she’s stumbling back, the torch shaking in her hand. Its light illuminates the thousands of scratches that climb the gentle slope where floor meets wall, scratches that follow the wall’s curve in either direction, stretching into a darkness torchlight cannot reach.   
  
She hears Jake speak, hears Mickey answer. She can’t quite understand the words over the rush of blood in her ears, but she hears Jake turn away and gag. The smell of his sick drives away the sweetness in the air, and she is thankful.   
  
Mickey’s mouth hardens into a determined line, and it’s only minutes before he finds the door, a few minutes more before he trips the lock. They step into a dimly lit corridor, and the door slides shut behind them.   
  
They stand silently for a long moment, breathing a little too fast and a little too loud. When their pulses slow to something like their normal pace, an unspoken agreement has been reached: _Shake it off. It never happened._   
  
They do this, sometimes. Forget.   
  
Rose leans back against the curved wall of the corridor. Her hands sink into something soft and wet — moss growing on the damp stone. She jerks forward, and Mickey and Jake stare at her, the whites of their eyes glowing strangely in the low light. “Okay,” she says, and takes a deep breath. “Right. I’m thinking we should stick with the usual plan.”   
  
Mickey looks at Jake. “Blow stuff up and run really fast?”  
  
Jake raises an eyebrow. “Talk a lot, almost get blown up, and then run really fast?”  
  
She sighs. “Hilarious, the both of you. Jake, think you’ll be able to find the power source on this thing?”   
  
He pulls the scanner from its pocket. After a moment, it beeps at him. “Yup,” he says. “It’s not far. About two levels down.”  
  
“Good,” she says. “Mickey, you’ll cover him. Radio me when the explosives are set and then transmat out of here. I have the detonator, if they make me use it.” She meets Mickey’s eyes as she hands him the Mormolykeion transmat. “You’re sure you can change the coordinates to send you home?”  
  
Mickey snorts. “Who do you think you’re talking to? Of course I can.” He shoves the transmat into his kit. “I don’t like this. You shouldn’t go alone.”   
  
Rose grins, and she knows it looks forced. “Who do you think _you’re_ talking to? I’ll be fine.” She pats her kit. “I’ll use the teleport prototype to get back.” She waits for Mickey to argue, waits for him to say, _You won’t, it doesn’t work, it’s never worked_ , but he stays silent. She takes a step back, away from them. “Well. See you later.”  
  
“Play nice with the creepy aliens,” Mickey says. “Remember your manners.”  
  
“Idiot,” Rose says. “Try not to blow yourself up, yeah?”  
  
They separate. She doesn’t let herself listen to their footsteps as they walk away.   
  
++  
  
 _Wishes, my child, are powerful things. They are the lights you take with you into the dark.  
  
Oh, you will find use for bravery and kindness and cleverness, if you are lucky enough to have them, but when the monster’s hands close round your young throat, it is the wish that will save you. Your will, child. Your heart’s desire.  
  
Wish for home. Wish for help. Wish for power.  
  
A wish is a kind of monster, too, you know._  
  
++  
  
Rose likes setting things on fire.   
  
For one thing, it’s usually pretty easy. A lot of things almost seem to want to catch fire — like, say, electronics. Communication consoles on alien spaceships, for example. It’s also a great way of getting someone — or _something’s_ — attention.   
  
Rose sucks on her burned finger and smiles while she waits.   
  
She doesn’t hear the alien until it clears its throat and says, “Rather pathetic attempt at sabotage, isn’t it?”   
  
The fire has shorted out all the power along this length of the corridor; the only light is the low fizzle of melting electronics, and the thing standing a few feet away is little more than a dark silhouette, tall and razor thin and still.   
  
Rose straightens, her hand on her sidearm. “More like a subtle bid for attention.”   
  
It laughs. “You were lonely?”   
  
“Actually, I was hoping for directions to the nearest loo. I’m getting a bit desperate.”   
  
The thing steps closer, but stays in shadow. “You are the Tyler woman, of the Torchwood Institute. Eastman spoke of you often.” Its voice is low and warm, amused. “You were not one of his favourite people.”   
  
“I didn’t kill him,” she says.   
  
“That is unfortunate,” it says. “We would have.”  
  
She keeps her voice even, disinterested; it’s not hard. “Will you try to kill me?”  
  
The fire sparks, and for a moment it burns brighter. In the brief light, she sees the figure standing beside her.   
  
Its skin is the colour of bone. There is, in fact, an almost skeletal grace in the curve of its spine as it looms over her, long long legs and arms and its _hands_ , thin fingers with an impossible number of joints that taper into delicate fingertips. One finger comes to rest against her cheek, light as a kiss. It draws blood.   
  
“No, Tyler,” the monster says. “We will not try.”  
  
Rose has time for one thought before the drug in her system takes effect and she slumps to the floor, unconscious. Her last thought is this:   
  
The monster’s face is almost featureless, like a stone worn smooth by sand and sea. It is cold, empty. But its eyes–  
  
Its eyes are human.


	3. Chapter 3

_One day, child, you will die.  
  
You do not believe me — I can see it in your face. You think death comes only to the old, or to the wicked. You think, dear heart, that in stories you will end well, and happily. You are young, and you are good, and you will not die.   
  
There’s more to stories than you think._   
  
++  
  
Rose wakes in a room filled with light.   
  
“Did you dream?” the monster asks. It leans over her, eclipsing the light from overhead. “You looked as if you were dreaming, but I wasn’t certain.”   
  
Rose jerks away, raising her hands to cover her face, but the creature does not try to touch her again. Her gun is gone, but the detonator is still a solid weight in her pocket. She doesn’t how long she’s been out; if Mickey and Jake have already tried to radio her–  
  
She exhales through her mouth, slowly. “It’s generally considered polite,” she says, “to give someone a little warning before you knock them out with the touch of a finger.”  
  
“You will have to forgive our friend,” a cool, clipped voice says from above them. “He is a great connoisseur of human sleep. He can occasionally become…overenthusiastic.”  
  
“I wouldn’t claim to be a _great_ connoisseur,” the monster says, “but it is a hobby of mine.” The skin around the monster’s eyes crinkles in a smile. “Dreams are my favourite. I collect them.”  
  
“That’s nice,” Rose says, pushing herself up onto her elbows. “Though by _nice_ I mean actually sort of horrifying.” She looks up.   
  
The room is beautiful. The walls are pale and iridescent, like the inside of a seashell, and they curve away and upward until they meet a ceiling of glass. Rose cranes her neck and sees the once familiar darkness of space, the faint light of faraway stars. She sees Earth, blue and white and far too close. She stands.   
  
“Charming place you’ve got here,” she says. “Though by _charming_ I mean–”  
  
“Yes, quite,” the cool voice says. It belongs to another alien, one seated before her on what could only be a throne. The alien beckons her forward with one long-fingered hand, and she steps up onto the dais. “You are frightened,” it says. “That is to be expected.”  
  
“Well, you’re very impressive,” Rose says. “Your Highness.”  
  
There is laughter from behind her. She spins around to see a crowd of aliens entering through an enormous arch, filing into the room in twos and threes. They are excited, murmuring to each other in anticipation; they look like school children queuing to get into a funfair.   
  
The alien on the throne chuckles. “This may be my court, Ms. Tyler, but I am no king. I am the Mormo.”   
  
Rose blinks. “The Moron? That’s your official title?” She whistles, rocking back on her heels. “I’m not one to judge, mate, but in your place I’d consider a career change.”   
  
The alien’s eyes narrow. “ _Mor-mo_ ,” he says, over-enunciating in his annoyance. He raises his arms, opening them wide, as if to encompass the great room and the growing throng of lithe-limbed aliens. “We are the Mormolykeion. I am the Mormo.”   
  
Rose gives him a blank look, and he sighs.  
  
“You would probably call me a high priest, or something equally ridiculous.” He shakes his head. “You humans and your persistent linguistic inelegance.”   
  
Rose crosses her arms over her chest. “ _Mormolykeion_ is just Greek for bogeyman,” she says. “Sounds pretty human to me.”   
  
The Mormo sits back in his throne, a smile in his eyes. “You’ve done your research. I’m impressed.”  
  
Rose glances at the alien who’d drugged her. “Well,” she says, “we all need our hobbies. For the last year or so, you lot have been mine.”   
  
“How flattering,” the Mormo says. “And what have you learnt?”  
  
Rose raises her chin. “Nothing that I like.”   
  
The Mormo laughs, and the others join in. Their laughter echoes, filling the room, and Rose’s fingers curl into fists.   
  
“Did I say something funny?” she asks through her teeth.   
  
The Mormo stands. “We do not mean to give offense,” he says. “On the contrary, we find you quite fascinating, despite your rather advanced age. Tell me, do you have any children?”  
  
Rose steps back, stumbling off the dais. “No,” she says. “No, I don’t.”   
  
The Mormo tilts his head to one side. “Pity.” He watches her face closely. “What is his name, the child you are here to protect? What is he to you?”   
  
Rose opens her mouth to answer, but she bites down hard on Matthew’s name. It almost hurts not to say it aloud. She covers her mouth with her hand.   
  
“Well done,” the Mormo says. A murmur of appreciation travels around the room. “You will find it difficult to lie to me, or to deny me any truth I might ask for. Most adult humans would find it impossible.”  
  
“What,” Rose says, her tongue stinging, “is that your evil alien superpower, or something?”   
  
“In a manner of speaking.” He takes another step closer, and the expression on his face is almost kind. “You will not stop us,” he says. “I am sorry, but I only tell you what you already know. If you give me your loved one’s name, I will see that he is spared.”   
  
For a moment, she is tempted. “Blimey,” she says. “You’re full of shit, aren’t you?”  
  
The Mormo’s lips twist up at the corners in a skeleton’s grin. “Perhaps,” he says. “Though I doubt that you are any different, Ms. Tyler. You are not what you seem to be.”  
  
Rose takes a deep breath. “Oh? What am I, then?”   
  
“Caged,” says a low, carrying voice. “You are a thing caged.”   
  
A woman emerges from the crowd. She is identical to her fellow aliens in every respect, but Rose _knows_ that she is female. Rose looks at her smooth, polished-bone face and sees her mother, her grandmother. She sees Mickey’s gran and Sarah Jane Smith and every woman she has ever trusted, ever admired. Rose takes a step toward her, unthinking. Drawn as if to candle flame.   
  
“You think,” the woman says, “that the cage protects the ones you love from what waits inside you. You think that your will can contain it, can keep it from doing harm.” The Woman’s voice is like honey, and Rose sways, leaning into her. “You think you are still the girl, and not the thing trapped inside.” She brushes long fingers over Rose’s forehead. “You are wrong.”   
  
Rose closes her eyes, savouring the touch. “I…” Her voice catches. “I don’t understand.”   
  
One cool finger traces Rose’s cheek. “Remember the story, my love,” the Woman says, and Rose has never wanted to remember anything more. “Remember the little girl with the sun in her eyes, the little girl who burned inside. She–”  
  
“She swallowed a star,” Rose says with her, sing-song, their voices in unison. “I remember. Was–” Rose hesitates. “Was that me?”  
  
“A long time ago, dear one. A very long time ago. That was the beginning.” The cool touch leaves Rose’s face. “Every story, child, eventually finds its way to darkness.”  
  
Rose frowns a little, a wrinkle appearing between her eyebrows. “I’ll light lamps to keep the dark away. I won’t let it touch him.”   
  
The Woman’s breath is sweet against Rose’s cheek. “Touch who, my love?”   
  
Matthew’s face, his pale hair and pointed chin and his hand, small in hers. She smiles, and opens her mouth to speak.   
  
There is burst of radio static in her ear, and Rose’s eyes snap open. “Don’t touch me,” she says, staggering backward. She exhales a long, ragged breath. “If you touch me again, I’ll kill you.”   
  
The Woman — the _thing_ — shrugs. She looks at the Mormo and her expression says, _Oh well, you can’t win ‘em all_. “She is somewhat resistant to psychic tampering. She has experience. Trauma, perhaps.”  
  
Rose wants to scream. Static from Mickey and Jake after _at least_ twenty minutes silence, if not more, and she can’t contact them, not without letting every bloody alien in the room know they’re here, and _God_ , she hates it when people muck about with her brain. “You guys are really lucky you took away my gun,” she says. “Really lucky.” Her voice is shaking.   
  
The Mormo gives her a pitying look. “You would not kill us,” he says. “After all, you are here to offer us a choice, are you not?”   
  
“I’ve changed my mind,” Rose says, unraveling. “Yeah, he would give you a choice, but I’m not him, am I? I’m this zoo animal in a cage, yeah, this ticking time bomb of bird-killing Vortex fury, and I’ve decided that I’m just going to blow your big creepy ship to pieces and then call it a day, all right?”  
  
The Mormo turns to the Woman. “Did you follow any of that?”  
  
She shakes her head. “Not really, no.”   
  
He frowns. “Is it one of those human female,” he makes an awkward gesture, “ _times_?”   
  
“Oh no,” the Woman says, “not this one.” She reaches out and presses her hand low on Rose’s stomach, over her womb. “This one is quite barren.”  
  
Rose grabs one long, pale finger and twists until the bone snaps. It makes a brittle, satisfying sound, and then the screaming begins. Which is also satisfying, in its way. The Woman collapses at her feet, writhing in pain.   
  
The Mormo storms down from the dais. “You will stop, now.”  
  
Rose shrugs, still gripping the Woman’s broken finger. “Her bones are somewhat susceptible to physical tampering. Trauma, perhaps?”  
  
The Mormo takes a step forward, and Rose grabs another finger. He stops. “She has done nothing to you. Release her.”   
  
Rose grins. “I told her not to touch me. In fact, I was pretty clear about it.” She tightens her grip on the unbroken finger, and her expression turns grim. “What do you do with the children? What do you need them for?”  
  
The Mormo pauses, as if surprised. “Need?” he says. “We do not _need_ them for anything. They are–” He thinks for a moment, and then he smiles. “They are a hobby, like any other.”  
  
Rose takes a deep breath and shoves the Woman away from her. She steps back, encompassed by an ever-tightening circle of Mormolykeion and their cold porcelain faces. “You have a choice,” she says. “I’m giving you a choice. Leave, and don’t come back.”   
  
The Mormo steps over the Woman’s trembling body. “Or what, Ms. Tyler?”  
  
Rose tilts her head up to meet his eyes, and the detonator is heavy in her trouser pocket. “Or you’ll die.” She takes a step toward him. “You know I’m not lying.”   
  
“Yes,” he says. “I do.” He looks past her, to the archway at the back of the room. “Bring them in,” he says.  
  
Three aliens drag Mickey and Jake into the room at gunpoint, forcing them to their knees.   
  
Mickey’s lip is bleeding and Jake’s cheek has been burned and they are both filthy, stained with sweat. It takes every ounce of will Rose has not to shout their names, to run to them. She stays quiet, her jaw clenched.   
  
“You were willing to die on this ship,” the Mormo says, walking around Rose in a slow circle. “Perhaps you even hoped for such a death, in your darker moments. It would be easier, would it not, to die a hero? It would solve so many problems. Answer so many uncomfortable questions. The fire would burn, and there would be nothing left to prove that you are anything but what you seem.” He stops, and looks at her friends. “Their deaths would not mean much to you, I think.”  
  
“Yeah, well, fuck you, mate,” Mickey says. He sounds almost amused. “You evil skinny-arsed stick insect.”   
  
Jake wheezes, and he holds himself as if he has a broken rib. “That’s not a very nice thing to say, Mick.” He grins at Rose. “About stick insects.”   
  
Rose closes her eyes. Her mad, beautiful boys. They want her to do it. They want her to destroy the ship with them still inside. She opens her eyes, meeting the Mormo’s rapt gaze. “You’ve already disabled the explosives.”   
  
“Yes,” he says. “My interest in your reaction was purely academic. You have already lost.” He gestures to the crowd, carelessly. “It is time. Go to your ships.”  
  
It happens so fast.   
  
The crowd moves as one toward the archway, flowing around Mickey and Jake and their captors, and through a gap in the rush of pale bodies Rose meets Mickey’s eyes. He nods.   
  
She reaches into her pocket and activates the detonator.   
  
The thing about Mickey and Jake — the thing that no one ever seems to remember — is that they really are cleverer than they look. For example: they always plant backup explosives.   
  
There is a deafening boom from below, and the floor trembles under their feet.  
  
It’s not enough to destroy the ship, not even close, but it’s a distraction, the best they can hope for, and Rose crashes through the panicked crowd, running toward the archway. Mickey slams into the closest guard, knocking the energy weapon from his long-fingered grip, and Rose dives at the one covering Jake. She snaps its fingers backward, and they slice into her skin like razors, cutting into her even as she breaks the bone. The alien collapses, howling, white hands red with her blood.  
  
She hears a weapon discharge, and Jake cries out. When she turns, Mickey is still falling.   
  
He’s already dead.   
  
It’s strange, how she can tell. Strange, that Jake cannot. Jake is shaking him — touching his shoulder, his face — and murmuring under his breath, words she cannot hear and does not want to, and he doesn’t seem to understand. Mickey took the blast directly in the chest, and death was almost instantaneous. He’s so still. How can Jake not know?   
  
Rose grabs a fallen energy weapon, turns on her heel, and aims the gun directly at the Mormo’s head. “Tell your people to stand down.”   
  
He twitches. “Of course,” he says. “We never wanted this.”   
  
Rose rolls her eyes. “Whatever.” She kneels beside Jake, her knees bumping against Mickey’s side. She gives Jake the gun. “Take this,” she says. “Shoot them if they come too close.”   
  
Jake is crying. She’s never seen Jake cry. “Rose–”  
  
She shakes her head. “No,” she says, “we’re not doing that. We’re not — we don’t have to.” She grins, showing teeth, and his eyes go wide. “I’m going to fix this. I’m going to make it all right.”   
  
She rests one hand on Mickey’s chest, over his heart, and then she opens the cage.   
  
+  
  
She is standing in the TARDIS.  
  
She can hear the roar of the truck, its tyres screaming, but it isn’t enough — the console holds.   
  
“Give it some more, Mickey!” her mum shouts, voice high over the low grind of the engine, but he’s doing all he can. They all have. There’s nothing left.   
  
Rose closes her eyes. She closes her eyes and holds her breath and then she makes a promise. A wish.   
  
_Anything. Anything you want, if you save him._   
  
The console cracks open, and   
  
“I don’t know how much you remember,” the Doctor says. The hay cart goes over a ditch, jostling them. Their shoulders knock together again, but this time they don’t laugh.   
  
“Nothing, really,” she says. It’s a lie, but only a small one; she’s been having dreams.   
  
The Doctor leans back on his hands, tilting his head to look into the fierce blue of the Scottish morning sky. “You opened the TARDIS, and looked into the Vortex. It’s not — I’ve never —” His jaw clenches. “You would have died. Almost did.”   
  
“But you took it out of me.”   
  
“You would have died,” he says again. He closes his eyes. “I took it all. I made sure of it.”   
  
Her back against a brick wall, and his mind in hers.   
  
_Please_ , she thinks. _Please don’t._   
  
“Can you hear it, Rose?” the Master whispers, his fingers clutching her face. “It burns and sings and it’s so close. So close, after all these years. Hiding away in a little human girl.” His mouth brushes hers, and she gags.  
  
The light grows brighter.   
  
“If you escaped the Time War,” Rose says, “don’t you want to know what happened?”   
  
Dalek Sec rolls forward, toward the Genesis Ark. “PLACE YOUR HAND–”  
  
She interrupts: “What happened to the Emperor?”  
  
The Dalek pauses. “THE EMP-ER-OR SUR-VIVED?”  
  
She remembers, now. Not everything she saw, not everything she knew, but how it felt — that she remembers. She probably has seconds to live, and a small part of her feels it still.   
  
Power.  
  
“He survived,” she says. “Until he met me.”  
  
+  
  
For a moment, she is blinded.   
  
6.78 billion human lives on the planet overhead and they flame like firecrackers, brief and bright and hot until there’s nothing left to burn. One hundred and fifty-six Mormolykeion stand circled around her, cold hands and thin chests filled with ash and soot and in each a throbbing knot, threads glowing blue-white with heat. Jake kneels beside her, the familiar golden light pulsing next to his heart.   
  
Mickey’s chest is dark.  
  
Her fingers slip inside, past skin and flesh and bone, until she cups the loose threads of Mickey’s life in her palm. They’re blackened and fragile, the remains of a wick consumed by its flame. They aren’t meant to burn again.   
  
Rose really doesn’t care.   
  
She has so much light, now. The light surrounding her, and the light inside — how could it ever have been a burden, to feel like this? To have twice had it within her grasp and to have twice _given it away_ — to the man who died of loving her, to the wretch who died for love of him —   
  
_dead she sees the Master dead and yet still living and that will be attended to soon enough, she thinks_  
  
— but it is hers now it _is_ her and Mickey is not dead, will not die because she will not let him and now it is that simple. She has decided it.   
  
She touches a finger to the frayed thread and brings Mickey Smith back to life.   
  
Gold bleeds from thread to thread and the knot within his chest coils, tightening, and Mickey —  
  
Mickey is born. His father leaves, and his mother leaves, and his gran smacks him on the side of the head, calls him a ‘stupid boy’ and means ‘I love you.’ Rose does not say ‘I love you,’ not once, but she laughs at his jokes and she likes it when he touches her and sometimes he thinks she might, a little. Love him.   
  
She leaves.   
  
Mickey is alone and then he isn’t, and soon he has open roads and a van that smells like feet and a best mate he isn’t in love with, except when maybe he is. He learns how to do paperwork, teaches Rose how to use a gun, drinks tea with Matthew from mugs shaped like Darth Vader’s helmet. He lives his life, until he dies.   
  
Rose brings him back, and he says no.   
  
His heart should be beating. His heart should be beating and he should be gasping for breath in a wheeze that turns into a wry chuckle and a stupid, stupid joke and he isn’t, he isn’t doing any of those things because he’s still dead and Rose —  
  
“But you can’t,” she says, and hears the echo in her voice, the power beneath the words. “I don’t understand. You can’t just refuse to — ”  
  
But he has. He’s gone.   
  
Rose stares at his face. She’s known him her whole life.   
  
“Rose?” Jake says, his voice shaking. “Rose, what have you done?”  
  
She looks up, meets Jake’s eyes. He isn’t crying anymore.   
  
He’s terrified of her.   
  
“Don’t,” she says, reaching for him. “Please, Jake, don’t–”  
  
He flinches away. “Whatever you’re doing, stop it. Stop it now.”   
  
“I can’t,” she says, “I’m trying and I can’t and I–” She wants to cover her face, her eyes, to hide the light he must see there. “Don’t tell them,” she says. “Tell them — tell them something, but don’t tell them this.”   
  
He grabs her shoulder, hard, and she leans into him, the crown of her head against his. He makes a low, broken sound. “I don’t understand. How–”  
  
She shoves him away. “Tell them I said goodbye,” she says, and then he’s gone.  
  
She sends Jake to their empty office at the Institute. The body she sends straight to the morgue.   
  
She stands, and every Mormolykeion in the room takes a step back. One alien turns to another and says under his breath, “You ever see a human glow like that before?”   
  
The other shakes his head. “Not when I was sober.”  
  
Rose walks up to him, reaches past his ribs, and rips the burning knot from his chest.   
  
++  
  
Soon the Mormo is the only one left. The floor is dark with ash.  
  
“The captain goes down with his ship,” she says, standing over him. “Or so I hear.”   
  
“What are you?” he says, gasping.   
  
“You know, I’m not quite sure.” She leans down, hands on her knees, and smiles at him. “But whatever I am, I’m a lot fucking scarier than you.”  
  
He doesn’t seem to disagree.   
  
++  
  
The Mormolykeion homeworld is sort of pretty, actually.  
  
Not much different to Earth, from orbit. White clouds and blue seas. From the flight deck of the ship she can see cities, rings of light surrounded by darkness. Rose closes her eyes and sees smaller lights, burning like bright coals among embers. There are billions of them.   
  
“Most of them have never been to Earth,” the Mormo says. Pleads. “Most have never even heard of it.”   
  
Rose presses her hands against the window, leaning until her forehead touches the glass. “I don’t know if I care,” she says.   
  
“We will never come back,” he says. She can smell his sweat, and it isn’t like anything human; it still smells like fear. “I swear to you. Your world is safe from us.”   
  
“But only my world.” Her fingers clench, painted fingernails scraping glass. “Not the others.”   
  
“I give you my word,” the Mormo says.   
  
If she wanted, she could be sure that it would never happen again. Could cradle the planet in her palm, could curl her fingers around cities and seas and flickering lights and crush them in her fist. She could, if she wanted to.  
  
She might.   
  
She smiles. “This may sound strange,” she says, turning away from the window, “but I don’t think I trust you.” She shrugs. “Can’t imagine why.” She raises her hand, and the knot of thread burning beside his heart begins to unravel. Slowly.  
  
He clutches his chest, sharp fingers scoring the bone pale skin, and cries out in a language she does not understand. She knows every word.   
  
_Anything_ , he says. _Anything you want, if you spare them._   
  
Her hand drops to her side. She turns back to the window, hiding her face against the glass. The world below turns slowly in the darkness.   
  
“I’ll know,” she says. “If you try again, I’ll know.”   
  
His head falls back against the wall. He’s breathing hard. “We won’t.”  
  
She can almost see her reflection in the glass; she closes her eyes. “You will,” she says, and when she opens her eyes he is gone — another light on the planet below, burning faintly.   
  
There is nothing to stop her. She opens and closes her hands, fingers stretching and contracting, and there is something like fire beneath her skin. Deep in the heart of this golden ship there is a dark, dark room with floors and walls of stone and she feels it like an ache, like a hollow carved from inside her own chest. Her hands begin to shake.   
  
“Once upon a time,” she says, “there was a girl.”   
  
Ships in orbit around the planet begin to burn, flames blooming from air locks and shattered windows. The escape pods leave unhindered, falling toward the planet.  
  
Her fists tighten, knuckles turning white. “She wandered far from home. Into the forest. Into the dark.”  
  
Shipyards on the planet below convulse with smoke, dark clouds billowing into blue skies. They struggle to put out the fires, but the damage has been done — thousands of ships, reduced to blackened shells. To skeletons.  
  
She could do more than this. She doesn’t.   
  
The floor beneath her feet begins to tremble, and she slumps against the window, pulling her knees to her chest. The engines are overloading, right on schedule. She covers her face with her hands and begins to laugh. The sound echoes though the empty ship.   
  
_Once upon a time —_  
  
“I don’t think,” she says, “that you want to know how the story ends.”  
  
The ship burns, and the bodies burn with it.   
  
++  
  
Rose steps into the corridor outside her bedroom door. The smell of smoke follows her, clinging to her skin.   
  
The house is dark, curtains drawn against the grey light of early morning. She opens the door and goes inside her room, closing the door behind her. She can hear the rain against the windows.   
  
Matthew is asleep in her bed. He sighs, dreaming.  
  
She stumbles into the en-suite bathroom, closes the door as softly as she can. When she turns, she sees her reflection in the mirror.   
  
In the darkness her eyes burn impossibly bright, golden and liquid and mad. Her mouth is slightly open, and past her lips and teeth and tongue she sees that same light, roiling at the back of her throat. She lurches forward and grips the bathroom sink, white porcelain like ice under her hands.   
  
Her hair is wild, knotted, framing her face — nose and ears and mouth, too-dark eyebrows and the spot on her chin. It is still her face, and she holds that thought close as she forces the light back, hiding it away. Her reflection dims.   
  
She can still feel it beneath her skin. Burning.   
  
Matthew cries out in his sleep. It is instinct that straightens her spine, that sends her through the door and into the room. She sits on the edge of the bed and smoothes the damp hair from his forehead, her fingers hot against his already flushed skin.   
  
“Hush, love,” she says. “It’s just a dream.”   
  
Matthew shudders and opens his eyes, wide and blue with sleep. He grabs her hand, fingers twisting into hers. “I wasn’t scared,” he murmurs. “I wasn’t.”  
  
“I know,” she says.   
  
He blinks, waking up. He lets go of her hand. “Rose.” He stares at her. “You came home.”  
  
It’s too much. The quiet house and the rustle of sheets and she bends, her back curving as she collapses in on herself, the top of her head falling against Matthew’s pillow. He makes a soft, surprised noise, his shoulder bumping against hers. He touches her hesitantly — her hair, the back of her neck, small fingers catching on tangles.   
  
“Mum made me wear my suit today,” he says. “It’s too small and the shoes pinch my toes, but when I told her I wanted to wear a jumper instead her face got all splotchy and she started to cry. Dad said people don’t wear jumpers to funerals.” He’s quiet for a long moment. “I said that people were stupid, wearing shoes that pinch when they’re sad already.”   
  
Rose laughs, but the sound catches in the back of her throat. She swallows. “Did you wear the suit?”   
  
“Yeah. It was still stupid, though.” He sits up, tugging at the hem of his pyjama top. “You smell weird.”   
  
She pulls herself upright, rubbing a hand over her face. “Yeah, well, so do you.”   
  
“Do not.” He frowns at her. “You’ve been gone for days.”   
  
“I know, Matthew.”   
  
He pulls his knees to his chest. “Jake is staying with us. Mum says he isn’t allowed to be by himself.” He chews on his lip, lowering his eyes. “He said you weren’t coming home — I heard them fighting about it. He said we’d never find a body, and that when we bury Mickey we should bury you, too.” He looks up. “Mum hit him. I could hear it through the door.”   
  
She takes a deep breath. “Bad habit, eavesdropping.”  
  
He shrugs. “No one ever tells me anything. Not when it’s important.”   
  
“I do.”   
  
His fingers tug at the blankets, clenching. “You weren’t here.”  
  
She touches his head, her fingers following the gentle curve of his skull, the bones beneath skin and fine, pale hair. She feels the pulse of light within him, thin golden threads curling toward her hand like vines growing toward sun. She remembers the way each burning knot fit in her palm, perfect and pulsing and alive; each one crumbled to ash in her hands before the body hit the floor.   
  
“Matthew,” she says, “I’m not here now.”  
  
He nods, slowly. “I didn’t think you were. I dreamt about you last night, too.”   
  
She tries to smile. “A good dream?”   
  
“Not really.” He looks away. “Something was wrong with your face. I couldn’t see what.” He pauses. “I didn’t really want to.”   
  
Outside, the rain stops; the room is quiet. Rose taps Matthew’s knee. “Lie down,” she says. He does, and she pulls the blankets up to his chest. He licks his lips, watching her.   
  
“Are you going to sing?” he says. “‘Cause that never helps.”   
  
“Little toad.” She brushes his fringe out of his eyes. “You never used to have nightmares.”  
  
“I did,” he says. “I just didn’t tell anyone.”   
  
Her hand stills against his cheek. She doesn’t breathe. “I could make them go away,” she says.   
  
He frowns at her. “No, you can’t. That’s impossible.”   
  
She taps one finger against his cheek, almost smiling. “I can do a lot of impossible things, love.” She bends down and whispers in his ear. “Would you like to see?”   
  
He pinches her arm, hard. He uses his knuckles, just like she taught him, and she jerks back, snatching her hand away from his face. “Stop it,” he says. “That’s not funny.”   
  
They are both silent for a long moment. “You’re right,” she says finally. “It’s not.” She turns away from him, bowing her head and raking her fingers through her hair. “You should go back to sleep. It’s almost morning.”  
  
He rolls onto his side, curling around her. His knee pokes her hip. “You worry too much. Like Mum.”   
  
Rose closes her eyes. “Mum worries because she loves us.”   
  
His hand finds hers. “I love us too, but I’m not worried.”   
  
Rose looks down at him and laughs — a small, strangled sound. “Yeah? Why not?”   
  
“‘Cause you’re here.” He squeezes her hand, fingers small in hers. “I’m not scared, ‘cause I know you’ll always save us.” He yawns, and when the yawn ends his eyes stay closed. “Even if you do smell weird.”   
  
She watches as he slips back into sleep.   
  
She’s seen him die. She can see it now, in the tendrils of light knotted in his thin chest _(can map the pattern of the shattered windscreen, count the eyelashes still against his cold cheek)_ — in thirty-five years, four months, and three days he will die, and when she looks at him it is as if it has already happened. It _is_ happening, right now, and she could stop it with a twitch of her fingers.   
  
She threw herself in front of an oncoming car, once. Fell to the asphalt and skinned her knee and landed beside her dad — not Pete, but _her dad_ — and he laughed it off, but she could see his hands shaking. She’d saved his life.   
  
In the end, the price of his reprieve was more than he was willing to pay.   
  
Rose looks down at her hand, at her palm pale and lined with dirt. It wouldn’t take much; all she need do is raise that hand. Raise her hand, close her eyes, and in a swell of light she could be certain that no one she loves would ever have to die. She wouldn’t let them.   
  
Her fingers curl into a fist, and Matthew shudders in his sleep.   
  
When he wakes to the rising sun, he is sure she was just another dream.   
  
++  
  
The sky is still dark when she walks onto the roof of the Powell Estate.   
  
She has stepped back in time, of course. In this universe the building was demolished in the early nineties, and when she arrives it is already abandoned, crumbling and grey in the darkness. It was never called the Powell Estate; this bothers her more than she thinks it should.   
  
The Doctor is waiting on the ledge, black leather darker than the sky, a stain against the concrete. He hears her approach, but he doesn’t turn. She sits beside him.   
  
“You weren’t the one I was expecting,” she says.   
  
He shrugs. “With a hallucination you pretty much get your pick.”   
  
“Good to know.” She lets her legs dangle, trainers scraping the side of the building, and looks down at the graffiti-stained sidewalk below; it’s a long way to fall. “It’s just — if you’re here to, you know, talk me out of it, I would’ve thought the other you would be the better choice.”   
  
He raises an eyebrow. “You implying something?”   
  
She grins. “Well, he’s very pretty.”   
  
He snorts. “Figures.” He leans back onto his hands, his shoulder brushing hers. A kiss of leather against cotton. “Maybe I’m not here to talk you out of anything.”  
  
She narrows her eyes at him. “Yeah?”   
  
“Yeah.” He looks at her, eyes ice blue and unreadable. “Maybe I’m here to say goodbye.”   
  
She flinches. “Don’t do that. Don’t make it sound like–”  
  
“Like what? Like I might care, if I ever found out?” His expression is dark, a storm on the horizon. The pre-dawn sky brightens. “You like that, don’t you? Knowing that no matter what happens here, I’ll always think of you standing on that beach with your mum and Mickey and Pete, one step away from a fantastic life. I’ll never know how the story really ends.”   
  
Her grip on the ledge tightens. “It’s not a story.”   
  
“It is to me.” He turns away, his profile slicing into the sky. “You know, I fell from a radio telescope, once.” He looks at her sidelong, out of the corner of his eye. “It’s not a pleasant death.”   
  
She stares out over the city. The sky is grey, tinged with gold; the sun is rising. “I’ll be all right,” she says.   
  
“You won’t.” His lips twist in a grim smile. “That’s sort of the point.” He stands, offering her his hand. She takes it, and he pulls her to her feet. “I lied,” he says. “I am here to talk you out of it.”  
  
She touches his arm, the crook of his elbow. “What I’ve done–” She stops. She watches her fingers as they slide against leather, moving down his forearm until her fingers link with his. “I know you scare yourself, sometimes. I remember the look you’d get, when you thought you might go too far. When you were tempted.” She looks up at his face. “I’m not like you. It doesn’t scare me anymore.”  
  
“I don’t believe you.”   
  
“Then you’re not paying attention.” She lets go of his hand. “You ended a war. I nearly destroyed a planet ‘cause some alien with a ray gun shot my ex.”   
  
He grins, teeth gleaming in something like a snarl. “And what would dear Ricky-boy say, if he could see you now? _So long, babe, enjoy the drop?_ ”  
  
She takes a step back, fists tightening at her sides. “Don’t talk about him.”  
  
“I’ll talk about whatever I like, thanks. Haven’t met anyone yet who could stop me.” He moves into her space, looming over her. “You know there’s another option, Rose.” She tries to pull away, but he grabs her arms. “Come find me. Cross the Void and find me on the other side. I can help.”   
  
She looks up, meeting his eyes. “And what if you can’t? What if even the Doctor can’t make me better?” She leans into him, her chest flush against his. She smiles. “You think I’m like you, but I’m not. I could do terrible things before you found the strength to stop me. If you ever did.”   
  
He swallows. “Rose–”  
  
“I could do terrible things to _you_ , and you would let me.” She touches his face, thumb tracing the sharp line of his jaw, and his eyes close. “You might even enjoy it.”   
  
When his eyes open again they are brown, not blue, and he is breathless, throat working beneath the loose knot of his tie. “You’re not playing fair, Rose.”   
  
She steps back, and he lets her. “I’m not playing at all,” she says. He is rumpled and familiar, pinstripes and scuffed shoes and brown shock of hair, and she is strangely relieved by the sight of him. He’s alive, somewhere, and he’ll never know how this ends. She gives him a small, crooked smile. “I’m glad I got to see you again. Even if you are just a figment of my imagination.”  
  
He frowns. “Why does everyone keep saying things like that? You lot are going to give me a complex.”  
  
She smirks. “Somehow I think your ego will survive.”  
  
“Oh,” he says, “you’d be surprised.”   
  
The wind rises and she shudders, chilled despite the fever beneath her skin and behind her eyes. She crosses her arms, hugging herself. “It might be best if you left,” she says. “Before.”   
  
His hands slip into his pockets, and his eyes are hard. “Not going to happen.”   
  
It is an ocean wind, sharp against her cheek and stinging her eyes. She can taste the salt in the back of her throat. She looks down at her hand, at the chipped varnish and the black cinders under her fingernails. “I think I asked for this,” she says. “I don’t know how, but I wanted…” She remembers, and the world shifts, glowing golden. “All I wanted was to keep you safe.”   
  
The Doctor reaches for her, his fingers sliding to the back of her neck. “Oh, Rose,” he says. “It’s never that simple.” He kisses her — cold, closed-mouthed, and lingering. He pulls away, his eyes dark; she licks her lips and tastes ashes.  
  
She almost wants to smile. “You took it out of me once,” she says. She loops her arms around his neck, rising to her toes. Her nose bumps against his. “That won’t work again.”   
  
He looks at her, a little cross-eyed. “It was worth a try.”   
  
“You’re not even real.”   
  
He does smile, his hands tightening on her waist. “I could say the same about you.”   
  
He releases her, moving out of her arms. The sky behind him is red and gold, and when the light strikes the towers of glass and steel it looks as if all of London is in flame. It is morning.   
  
Rose steps up onto the ledge. Airships gleam in the distance, silent and still and beautifully strange, even after all these years. This is not her city; she loves it nonetheless. She turns her back on the horizon, the wind whipping her hair into her eyes. The Doctor watches her, his thin face empty of emotion. “I have one question,” he says.   
  
She nods.   
  
He steps forward, into her shadow. Looks up into her face. “How long, do you think, before your mother believes you’re dead?”   
  
She gives him half a shrug. Half a smile. “Nothing wrong with a little hope,” she says, and lets herself fall. 


	4. Chapter 4

The Master stares at her. “Hold on,” he says, “let me get this straight.” A streetlamp flickers overhead. “You can’t die.”   
  
“Nope.” The thing that was Rose Tyler sits cross-legged on the ground in front of him, her toes curling into cracks in the asphalt. “Not even a little.”   
  
This piques his scientific curiosity, as well as an interest of a rather more morbid nature. He takes a slurp from his Big Gulp. “Intriguing. What have you tried?”   
  
She looks up, as if consulting a mental list. “Threw myself off a building, to start with. When that didn’t take, I moved on to drowning, suffocation, electrocution, cyanide, a single gunshot wound to the head, and–”  
  
He can move fast, when he needs to. One moment the jagged piece of scrap metal is in the skip with the rest of the rubbish, and the next it is buried in her torso, protruding obscenely from the valley between her small breasts. She looks down at the bloodless wound, then back up at him.   
  
“–And impalement,” she finishes. She taps the piece of scrap metal with one finger and it crumbles, showering pale dust into her lap. Her chest is unmarked; her t-shirt is ruined. She tugs at the frayed edge of the hole. “Bugger,” she says. “I liked this one.”   
  
He settles back against the cold steel of the skip. It smells like piss. “You’ve got the infinite power of time and space at your fingertips,” he points out. “Why don’t you just mend it?”  
  
She shakes her head. “It’s easy to break things,” she says. “Gets more complicated when you try to fix them again.” She flows to her feet, the movement at once graceful and oddly disjointed. She reaches into the skip and pulls out a worn gym bag. She drops it at his feet. “There are clothes in here. You should probably put them on.”  
  
He unzips the bag and finds a ragged pair of trainers, a sweatshirt, and grey pyjama bottoms. He holds the sweatshirt up by its hood; it is blood red. “Oh, but Grandmother,” he says, “what a tenuous grasp of irony you have!”  
  
She gives him a little bow. “The better to dress you with, my dear.” She smirks, crossing her arms over her chest. “Would you like me to turn around? I wouldn’t want to offend your delicate sensibilities.”   
  
He chuckles, and feels the sound grind in the back of his throat. “I wouldn’t want to offend yours.”   
  
She rolls her eyes, but pivots in place until she faces the empty lot. He watches her turned back for a moment _(as stupid as she is invulnerable, which hardly seems fair)_ and then he stands. The pyjama bottoms are easy enough, but after he pulls them up over his hips he needs to bend down again to get the sweatshirt. Blood rushes to his head and he sways, his legs trembling like a newborn foal’s. His new body betrays him, lurching forward, and it is only her grip on his bare arm that stops him from falling face first onto the asphalt.   
  
They both stare at the place where her hand touches his skin.   
  
Her fingers are hot as branding irons; he refuses to wince. He has to tilt back his head to look into her eyes. “Are you going to let go?”   
  
Her expression is serene. “I don’t know,” she says. “Are you going to fall down again?”   
  
He jerks his arm out of her hold and stumbles back against the skip. None of this fits, not a word of it, and he finds it infuriating. He finds her infuriating, which is the one thing that _does_ fit, but for all the madness in her eyes she is frighteningly calm, untroubled by his presence or his touch. Amidst the storm of fury and confusion and curiosity he feels, he finds time for a moment of disappointment. He clutches the sweatshirt to his chest. “Why did you do that?”   
  
She sighs. “It’s always why with you. _Why_ did I bring you back from the dead, _why_ did I stop you from eating pavement, _why_ did I castrate you with a machete–” She pauses. “No, wait. Haven’t got round to that one yet.”   
  
He cannot stop the look of speechless horror that crosses his face.  
  
She grins. “Sorry. Bad joke.” She kneels and guides his feet into the trainers. “You seem to be unusually stupid about this sort of thing, so I’ll explain it to you.” She looks up from the shoelace she’s tying and meets his eyes. “You think I’m your victim, but I’m not. I’m your enemy.” She gives the knot one last tug and stands. “You’ll learn the difference.”   
  
He doesn’t have anything appropriately insulting to say to that, so he pulls the sweatshirt on over his head. He shoves his hands into the pockets and grimaces. “Now that I’m suitably clothed, are we going somewhere?”   
  
“That depends,” she says. “Do you remember where you parked your TARDIS?”   
  
++  
  
The end of the universe has changed since he visited it last.  
  
Professor Yana spent most of his life by the sea, not far from where he’d been found as a child. The Master is occasionally unable to separate Yana’s true memories from those the Arch had manufactured, but he knows what they should find when they arrive.  
  
They’d never learnt the city’s true name. The language of its people had been lost for millennia, but the ruins were an ideal shelter for the refugees of a dying galaxy. They called it the Silver Devastation — a shining city, a corpse picked clean by time and the hunger of her scavengers. Yana had loved it, in his way.   
  
It is gone.   
  
There is no city. There is no sea. There is no sun, no light and no heat and if it were not for Rose’s hand on his elbow, for the fire in her skin and the flames in her eyes, he would freeze to death within moments. He scowls at her. “You’re a rubbish navigator,” he says, “though I don’t know why I’m surprised.” He gestures to the colourless dust around them. “I think you may have miscalculated the time of our arrival.”  
  
Her fingers dig into his arm, but her voice is even. “You’re the driver; I’m just the petrol. It’s not my fault if you were a few thousand years off.”   
  
He looks up. There is little left of the planet’s atmosphere, but he cannot see the stars. There are none left to see. “We were losing orbit,” he says, remembering. “Drifting away from the sun. It was going to take hundreds of years, but it felt like it was getting colder every day.”  
  
He turns back to her and finds that she is watching him, frowning slightly. “You lived here,” she says. It is not a question.   
  
“No,” he says, “I didn’t.” He swallows, glad of his respiratory bypass system. Glad not to breathe in the dust. “Enough gawking. The TARDIS is this way.”   
  
They don’t need to walk far. They follow the coastline of the barren seabed, using Rose’s rather eerie glow to light their way, and after about ten minutes something tall and slender interrupts the flat monotony of the horizon. Something tall, slender, and rather leafy on top.   
  
Rose stops walking. “That’s a palm tree.”   
  
The palm tree sways gently, though there hasn’t been a breeze on this planet for at least half a century. Hanging just below the branches are coconuts — three of them.   
  
“No one ever tells you,” she says, “just how exhausting it is to go mad.”   
  
“You’re not going mad.” He glances away from the tree, down at the molten gold of her eyes. “Well, you are, but that’s not why you’re confusing a dead planet at the end of the universe with Miami Beach.” He points at the palm tree. “That, my omnipotent love muffin, is my TARDIS.”   
  
She gives him a steady, examining look. “Let me guess. You went to Club Med and the chameleon circuit broke.”   
  
He sniffs. “Not all of us daydreamed our way through the basic TARDIS maintenance module, _thank you_.” He stomps off toward the tree; he’s lucky that she decides to follow him, her hand still on his arm. “I didn’t program this disguise, obviously. The thing’s been dormant for millennia — must be a glitch in the system.” He knocks on the rough wood of the trunk.  
  
Nothing happens. After a moment, a frond twitches — the sort of twitch that almost seems to say, _Piss off_. That is, the frond would’ve seemed to say _piss off_ if fronds ever seemed to say anything at all, which they don’t. The Master finds himself longing for his laser screwdriver.  
  
“I don’t think he likes you,” Rose says. She sounds as if she’s trying not laugh.   
  
The Master rolls his eyes. “It’s not a _he_ , you twit. No matter what that ferret-faced imbecile might have taught you, a TARDIS is a machine, not a pet, and telepathic or not this particular model is more tin can than time capsule.”  
  
Two fronds shudder in the nonexistent breeze. They seem to say, _I am armed, you know._   
  
“Rose,” the Master says, “would you mind standing in front of me for a moment?”   
  
She chuckles — a dry, dusty sound. “Nice try.” She reaches out and _strokes_ the tree, caressing the trunk and then giving the bark a good scritch where it’s peeling. “Hello,” she says softly. “Sorry he’s such a git. You can electrocute him if you want — I know I wouldn’t mind.”  
  
The Master grits his teeth. “This isn’t your boyfriend’s crap Type 40 TT, you know. This ship was standard issue during the War; it has weapons systems.”   
  
She shrugs. “So? It’s not like it can hurt me.”   
  
“It can bloody well hurt me!”   
  
She grins. “You’ll regenerate.” She thinks about this, tapping her finger against her chin. “Maybe you’ll come back prettier.”   
  
He makes an inarticulate sound of intense annoyance, and a door swings open in the trunk of the palm tree. The door is somehow wider than the tree itself, but it’s the sort of thing that only bothers you if you look at it for too long.   
  
Rose gives the tree another pat. “Brilliant,” she says, and steps inside. After a moment’s hesitation, he follows.  
  
Inside, the TARDIS is much the same as it was. The design for this model was utilitarian, simple and clean and slightly cheap. The console, walls, and floor are a colour best described as somewhere in the unwelcoming neighbourhood between beige and grey. A narrow corridor leads to the only three other rooms on the ship — a small kitchen, an infirmary, and a toilet. It was not built for comfort.   
  
Rose bounces up and down on the shabby paisley sofa by the console. “This is nice,” she says. Her nose wrinkles. “A bit dusty, though.”   
  
He lingers near the open door. “I didn’t have a sofa,” he says.   
  
She stops bouncing. “Maybe the TARDIS didn’t think you deserved one.”   
  
He slaps his hand against the nearest roundel. “For the _last time_ , this ship does not have thoughts, or feelings, or secret stashes of paisley sofas that it withholds from the undeserving. It is nothing more than a malfunctioning piece of equipment that, to be perfectly honest, never worked all that well to begin with, and once I gut its pitiful excuse for a memory drive I’m going to be damned certain that it never waves its fucking fronds at me _ever again_.”  
  
Behind him, the door slams closed.   
  
“Uh oh,” Rose says.   
  
The world flares with light, and at first he thinks he has gone blind. What moments before had been a small, drab room is now an endless expanse of white, a wall-less, door-less forever that stretches in all directions without colour or shadow. They’re trapped.  
  
“Well,” Rose says from the sofa, “doesn’t this give an exciting new meaning to _bigger on the inside_.”   
  
The Master walks across white floors until he reaches the sofa. He sits down beside her and lets his head fall back against the cushions. He presses his hand over his eyes. “I wish I were dead,” he says. “Being dead was nice.”   
  
She pats his shoulder. “Oh, pumpkin. I wish you were dead, too.”   
  
He grabs her hand, running his thumb over the heavy silver ring she still wears. “You have a funny way of showing it,” he says.   
  
She goes very still, her hand like stone in his. “You made me a promise. Can’t keep promises if you’re dead.”   
  
He nods, slowly. “As far as I can recall,” he says, “I’ve only ever promised you two things.” He brushes her hair out of her face, tucking a filthy strand behind her ear. “First, that I would never lie to you. The second–”   
  
“I want you to kill me,” she says.   
  
The Master pauses, the tip of his tongue against his teeth. “You can’t die.”   
  
She shrugs. “You’ll figure something out.”   
  
“Right,” he says. “Of course I will.” He sits back against the arm of the sofa, tapping his fingers against the cushion. “But why?”  
  
She was not beautiful, before. Was not like Lucy, with her delicate porcelain madness, or even pretty Miss Martha Jones, whose steady-handed defiance only sharpened her charms. Rose Tyler had been young and foolish and a little bit coarse, and though he had liked her perfectly well up until the moment she’d shoved him against a wall and begun to throttle him, he had never thought her beautiful.   
  
She is not beautiful now. He looks at her smile and wonders if her teeth have grown sharper since last he saw it.   
  
Rose stands. She seems almost unreal against the colourless horizon, a severe silhouette of dirty hair and ragged clothes and bare feet. She reaches out and places her hand on a waist-high white hexagon that was not there a moment before. It is the TARDIS console.   
  
“The universe is dying,” she says. “I know you can feel it too, but–” Her mouth twists. “But it’s different, for me. The lights going out one by one.” She turns to him, leaning back against the console. Her hair falls into her face. “It’s natural and inevitable and by now there’s probably no one left to save, but I could, you know. I could coax fire from a thousand dead suns and breathe life into a thousand dead worlds and it would only make me stronger. It would only make me want to do more.”   
  
“Why don’t you?” he says. “Do more.”  
  
She looks up, and there is something ancient and laughing in her eyes. “I don’t think,” she says, “that I know how to answer that in a way you’ll understand.” She drags her fingers along the edge of the console, her eyes following the path of her hand. Her expression turns gentle. “Poor thing. He’s been alone for such a long time.”   
  
The time rotor moves, flaring with golden light, and the room reappears. If its colour scheme is more eggshell than beige, the Master chooses not to notice. He stands. “Tell it to open the door. We’ll find another ship.”   
  
She raises one eyebrow. “Far as I know, there’s only one other TARDIS in the universe, and it’s currently occupied.”   
  
He steps forward, backing her against the console. “In case it’s escaped your notice, you suicidal, rot-brained freak of nature, this ship is in no condition to take anyone anywhen or anywhere. The toaster oven is broken, the shower is always out of hot water, and it’s a mutinous time-travelling _sentient thing_ that will probably try to kill me the first time your back is turned. Also, it’s growing coconuts.” He pauses for dramatic effect. “Three of them.”   
  
Rose grins. “Yeah,” she says. “He’s perfect.” She reaches up and pats the time rotor. “I think I’ll call him Larry.”   
  
He shoves his hands in the stupid pockets of his stupid red hoodie and sits down on the sofa again with a plop. “I hate you,” he says. “A lot.”   
  
“You’re just sore ‘cause I can kill you with a wave of my hand.” She pauses. “Actually, don’t think I even have to wave my hand anymore. Bet I could just sort of squint in your general direction.”   
  
The Master crosses his legs at the knee and folds his arms and for a moment he can almost imagine that his hoodie and trainers are a sharp black suit and tie. “I do wonder what the Doctor would say, if he could see you now. His precious lost girl, hands still wet with blood.” He grins, a vicious twist of lips and teeth. “Tell me, Rose — how many people died before you finally decided you needed to be stopped?”   
  
He isn’t sure what he expects — denial, fury, violence. He half expects to be reduced to atoms, to crumble to ash again and join rest of the dust hiding between the sofa cushions. He doesn’t expect her to hold out her hand.   
  
“One hundred and fifty-six,” she says. “I murdered one hundred and fifty-six people, and one of them was the first boy I ever kissed.” She wiggles her fingers. “Are you going to take my hand, or what?”   
  
He does, and she pulls him to his feet. “One hundred and fifty-six,” he says. He is grudgingly impressed.  
  
“If I’d done anything less, do you really think I would’ve come to you?” She tugs him over to the console and places his hands on the controls. “Larry will go wherever you like; I’ve asked nicely. He probably won’t kill you once we get there.”   
  
“I’ll set this thing on fire before I call it Larry,” he says under his breath, but she is no longer listening. Or, at least, no longer listening to him — her gaze is fixed on a distant point, on something that is not there, and he watches as the fingers of her right hand twitch.  
  
“Let me know,” she says, “when you’re ready to keep your promise.”   
  
She disappears down the narrow corridor, and the Master sets the coordinates for their first destination.


End file.
